Marigold Wine
by Kristi
Summary: In the 60s, Trapper visits his old army buddy at a hippie commune, where Hawkeye has retreated to find peace. H/T. Slash.
1. Chapter 1

Title: "Marigold Wine"  
Author: Aura218/Kristi  
Pairing: Hawkeye/Trapper, Hawkeye/others  
Genre: Drama, romance, longfic, postseries, 60s  
Summary: In the 60s, Trapper visits his old army buddy at a hippie commune, where Hawkeye has retreated to find peace.

Notes:  
For the math geeks: By book/movie canon, Alda et al were playing far younger characters than themselves. According to _M*A*S*H Goes to Maine_ (e.g., Wikipedia), Hawkeye Pierce was 31 in 1954.

Now, I'm no arithmatist, so let's keep it loose and say that this story takes place in the mid-60s, putting Hawkeye and Trapper in their mid-40s.

"Marigold Wine"

Part 1

"Hawkeye says you and he are old friends," said his adolescent chauffer.

Trapper glanced at him. A particularly aimed rut on the dirt road caused the ATV to lurch and his stomach to leap into his throat. He snapped his eyes onto tree-lined road ahead of them.

"Dr. Pierce and I were in a convenient little war together."

"Sorry, man. You were like, totally tools of the rich man's war."

_Can you come for a visit this summer?_ Hawkeye's letter had said.

_I sure as hell would like to get out of Dodge for a week or so_, he'd written back.

The claustrophobic trees lining the mud road opened up to a clearing. A wooden archway painted in multicolors welcomed Trapper to the Sitsips Commune Experience. This was it: Trapper was approaching his first counter culture immersion. There was no turning back, unless Trapper stole a VW bus.

"Um, hope you, y'know, like it here," the kid said. "Maybe you can find that source of your anger and disengage it from your personhood."

Trapper hopped out of the clunky, muddy vehicle. "Just take my bags, kid." Punk.

The kid drove off down one of the forest paths, taking Trapper's gear with him. Apparently Hawkeye didn't live in downtown Mudpuddle.

Birds chirped. Trapper could hear a hum of a motor in the distance and the pounding of some equipment. An older man and two little girls sat on the porch of one of the cabins, shelling beans. The girls stared at Trapper warily; the old man ignored him. A large carved statue poked up between some flowering bushes in the distance, hung with what looked like ribbon or yarn and hundreds of little somethings-elses that Trapper didn't look too closely at. One long, tin house flanked to his left, and some cabins went off behind that. A few paths ran into the woods.

Trapper began to feel itchy and wondered what to do with his hands. Leather shoes were a stupid thing to wear to a commune. His sneakers would have been comfortable, he supposed, though he'd have felt foolish wearing them out in public all day like a kid. His punk chauffer had worn blue jeans with a patch like a bird track on the seat, and the old man over there was wearing basketball shoes. Where was everyone?

A door banged. Trapper whirled, sliding a little in the mud but catching himself. The door slapped back on its hinges and someone whooped. (_"Wounded in the compound!"_) A long, tall glass of familiarity was running from the tin building with the corrugated roof. Panic bubbled between Trapper's heart and spine, but he turned off the ears that were in his brain and didn't listen for choppers. The man with more grey than black in his hair was Hawkeye, civilian doctor.

"Trapp-err!"

Hawkeye grabbed him around the waist, all grins, and they spun in the mud like drunken ice skaters. Hawkeye didn't hug so much as pull the life out of him, feeling Trapper down as if to be sure he was real, whole, with no parts missing. Trapper held him back, feeling stupid but also relief from the worse stupidity he felt a moment earlier. He was in the right place with the right person. Things would be easier here.

Trapper felt himself kissed on the corner of his mouth. He gave Hawkeye a shove, playfully.

"You nut, what is this showboat?" Trapper said.

"This is a great experiment!" Hawkeye crowed, proud as punch.

Trapper held his friend at arm's length, getting a good look at him for the first time in ten years. They met up once after the war, at the reunion, but it hadn't been the same.

"This is our third summer," Hawkeye was saying. "My second. Lena is just over the way . . ."

Hawkeye seemed taller now, but perhaps that was the difference of real life versus a claustrophobic army camp. His hair was almost all grey and even silver, but it suited him. He still had the posture of a gargoyle but had filled out a bit; Trapper could feel a muscle or two under his button-down work shirt.

Apparently Trapper had just missed lunch. As people streamed from the metal longhouse, Hawkeye snagged idlers and made much of Trapper as his best war buddy. Introductions abounded, and Trapper was surrounded by people in gypsy garb, others in 'normal' stuff, lots of blue jeans in various states of decoration. He shook hands with Moonbolt and his musician wife, who were working on a "concept" album. She carried on her hip their baby, whom Hawkeye had delivered, a tiny thing Trapper could hardly believe belonged to such young, longhaired people. Trapper was well welcomed by Mr. and Mrs. Robinson, an elderly poet couple up for the summer. A Santa Claus looking man who was responsible for the cabbage farm had lived "over yonder" for decades. Hawkeye pointed out a gaggle of college kids loafing around a radio, who were volunteering to pull in the harvest in exchange for room and board.

"We're building an enclave of creativity here," Hawkeye explained, leading Trapper by the elbow.

"And they needed a doctor?"

"A bit," Hawkeye said. "Lots of babies, the occasional farm accident. Mostly, I needed them. I'm writing a book," he said proudly.

"No kidding? That's great."

Hawkeye shrugged. "I'm on sabbatical for two years. It'll be something to tell the grandchildren, huh?"

They approached a blonde woman was watching them as she stacked bricks around an outdoor grill. One of the kids, a Black boy with green eyes, ran ahead of them to the blonde's side. She spoke to him and waved to Hawkeye. The boy took off with a few other children about his size. When the woman stood, she easily hefted a baby strapped to her front in an Indian print blanket.

Hawkeye kissed her on the rise of her cheekbone. "And this is the lovely Lena."

"Can you take him?" she said to Hawkeye. "Hello, Dr. Trapper John. I've heard so much about you."

"Just say it 'Trapper', beautiful." Trapper took her hand and kissed her cheek.

Hawkeye's wife was tall and had the look of someone whose body had just incubated a whole human turkey for nine months. She had a bit of an accent, something precise like English but not quite. Her cheekbones were broad and her nose freckled, and her brow high over bright, blue eyes. She looked like she was born into her long skirt, her leather hair thong thingy at the nape of her neck, and the tied blouse that the baby kept pulling at. Frankly, she looked the opposite of the type Hawkeye usually went for, or used to go for.

"Hawkeye has told me many things about your unit in Korea," Lena said.

"I hope not too much," Trapper said.

Lean smiled. "Only the parts that tell me I shouldn't trust him with you too long, at least not around flammable materials."

Trapper laughed.

Trapper watched the kid watching him as it haughtily tolerated the indignity of being destrapped from one parent to restrapped to another. Hawkeye's last letter contained a blue watercolor card of a sleeping infant, with the usual stats in pen-and-ink. Not something you usually see as a birth announcement, but it was cute. Minimalist. It said the kid was born over a year ago.

Hawkeye adjusted blanket, grimacing as the buckle cut into his neck. Lena turned away from him, stacking bricks at the bar-be-que. Trapper flicked his gaze between them. Something was up. Something weirder than Hawkeye being responsible for the existence of a human carpet shark. On purpose. It goggled at Trapper with curious blue eyes. Trapper looked away.

Hawkeye smiled broadly. "And this is Sunny."

"I read your letter," Trapper said. "He's beautiful, Hawk. Looks just like you."

"It's the eyes," Lena said. "Everyone says so."

"And the hair," Hawkeye said, smoothing the baby's dark capped crown.

"I was sure you pickled all your parts long ago," Trapper said. "So you went with 'Sunny'?"

"Because on the day he was born," Lena said, "the first time I saw him, the sun shone on his face and he smiled."

"I told her those bubbles of amniotic fluid come up from time to time," Hawkeye said. "The name the government knows him by is David Sebastian Franklin Klein-Pierce."

Trapper touched his mustache. "That's a mouthful."

"We figured we'd give him options," Hawkeye said.

"No kidding," Trapper said. Hawkeye probably agonized over it and then threw in everything but the kitchen sink.

Trapper took one of the chubby little fists hesitantly. Sunny gripped it hard and pulled it in for a gnaw, but Trapper didn't want to give him any germs. Louise let the girls put anything in their mouths; no wonder they still bit their fingernails, psychoanalytically speaking. Trapper could see mostly Lena in the shape of the face, although Sunny's eyes were Hawkeye's clear blue, rather than his mother's darker shade. Despite Lena's bone structure, something about the stubborn set of the jaw a the kid sized Trapper up seemed to say, 'I know what you're up to, and I want in on it.'

"I think I could get to like this kid," Trapper said.

"We've grown fond of him," Hawkeye said.

"He's a very good baby," Lena said.

"If only we could teach him not to pet kitty's eyes," Hawkeye said.

"He loves animals," Lena said.

"Especially the squishy parts," Hawkeye said.

"That's very advanced," Trapper marveled.

A bell tolled behind them.

"Ship come in?" Trapper said.

"My students!" Lena said. "Trapper, I want to hear all about you and Hawkeye's time together, the happy and the challenges. We learn as much from both, no?"

Trapper scuffed the gravel. "Yeah, sure."

Lena nodded to Hawkeye. "Dinner?"

"Chicken or pasta?" Hawkeye asked the question a bit overly seriously, Trapper thought.

Lena fussed with Sunny in his sling, making him wibble.

"I think I could do chicken," she said.

"Are you sure?"

Trapper wandered to the tin building, feeling put in the middle of this very intimate dinner conversation. Maybe money was an issue and they were embarrassed. He certainly didn't care if they fed him steak or peanut butter, he'd had a bachelor's meal of hot dogs and tinned beans for three nights last week. He hoped he wasn't making his friend feel he had to impress him just because he, Trapper, had been going to international conferences while Hawkeye had become a mountain man.

Trapper noticed that the tin longhouse was sort of the multipurpose room, not just a mess tent as he'd originally assumed. There was a potbelly stove in the middle and long tables in a rectangle around it. Near as he could guess, one whole long wall was on hinges and could be opened with a winch in summer. Interesting engineering, considering it looked to be made of a former bus married to an airliner. Inside, some little girls were doing one another's hair near the opposite window while a few older kids were clumped near the stove for probably no good reason. Lena's class, one assumed.

He felt he ought to do something before someone set themselves on fire. He turned to call Lena, but she was already bustling past him, exuding teacherly reliability.

"Er, there's some kids in there --"

"Burning bugs on the stove, I know," she said. "I've told them no eating in class, but they like them crispy."

The door banged shut before Trapper could wipe the expression off his face.

He heard boots crunching up behind him. No, he thought, not boots, wood bottomed hand-cobbled clogs, at the bottom of a pair of corduroys with a paisley denim patch on the thigh.

"You never had a chocolate ant?" Hawkeye said. Sunny had his fist wrapped around his father's shirt and was working it into his mouth.

Trapper looked him over with care. "No, but I had a very vanilla uncle."

"C'mere." Hawkeye beckoned Trapper to follow him. "Help me carry the clay oven up from the bar-be-que pit? We need it for dinner."

The thing was a sixteen-inch diameter clamshell in terra cotta, big enough to swallow a whole roast. It looked revolting on the outside but, when Trapper turned the lid inside-out for ease of carrying, he found it scrubbed and shiny inside.

"You bury it in the fire," Hawkeye said. "Slow-cooks things, it's great."

Trapper grunted. It must have weighed fifty pounds. The best way to carry it was to put one half on each bicep like some sort of Ptolemaic cabana boy. And so, with their burdens, they started up a steep and rocky path to the cabin Hawkeye called home.

The clamshell oven was communally shared, Hawkeye explained reverently, like the bar-be-que pit and the ATV and other large, expensive items that everyone used but not every day. Trapper had no idea how they kept track of it all. Was there a little corporal running around with a clipboard and an inventory sheet? He'd taught Cathy and Becky to share their toys, but the fun of being an adult was buying the stuff you wanted and keeping the Frank Burnses of the world from breaking it.

"By the way," Hawkeye said as they left their muddy shoes on the porch of his small cabin, "her name's Klein, not Pierce. She's her own person."

They stepped into the cabin and Hawkeye groped for a light.

"I thought you were married." Trapper sniffed. Woodsmoke, meals, summer. A window was open somewhere to let the dew-damp forest smell in.

"We are. . . . More or less." Hawkeye clicked on a light and was bathed in a yellow glow. "Just set that on the hearth. Just because you're married to someone doesn't mean you owe your whole life to them. She didn't give up her personhood to become my wife and I didn't swallow her up."

"There's that word again." Trapper thunked the awful pot onto an overturned crate and sank into an old, soft chair by the fireplace. The cabin didn't seem to have a real kitchen, but one could call the table and hotplate a breakfast nook. The back of the rectangular room was divided by a curtain, where Hawkeye indicated the kid on the ATV had left his bags on the bed back there. Another mattress had been hauled in, but Hawkeye insisted Trapper would have the bed. There was a loft above the back third, but it seemed to be storage. No indoor bathroom, but then, having the shitter away from a small living space had its benefits.

"How d'you mean, 'more or less'?" Trapper asked.

Hawkeye shrugged. "It's nothing. We just needed some space. For the past four months."

Trapper stared. "You've been sleeping on the couch for four months?"

Hawkeye picked up a dish towel and folded it half to death. "No, I slept on the couch for a month. Then she moved into the women's house and, well, what do you know about free love?"

Trapper raised his eyebrows. "She's cheating on you?"

"Of course not," Hawkeye said. "We're very open. Very, very modern . . . I'm so modern it makes me want to turn caveman sometimes."

Trapper looked around. So Hawkeye got the man cabin and she got the man. Some swarthy earth-pirate, no doubt, a nice blonde biology post-grad.

"We're still married," Hawkeye said. "We're in love and care about each other. I like her guy, he's not some secret she's keeping from me." Hawkeye raised one finger and spoke with the wisdom of Tevye. "Always honesty. Some things just came up that we have to work through together. It's not like you and Louise."

Trapper left that alone. "And you still have to babysit?"

Hawkeye smirked. "What babysit? Sunny's my kid too."

Trapper harrumphed. He knew a man quoting a woman when he heard it.

Hawkeye lowered Sunny onto a blanket on the floor. "Look, Trap, I know this is weird to you. It's a different kind of life here. I didn't get it at first, either -- I put my name on my bike, just because I brought it with me!"

"No kidding."

"But it makes so much more sense when you think about it. When you can trust the people you live with, you don't need all that macho B.S. That's just make-believe we use to keep up our egos, but it just makes us miserable, and invalidates the people around us."

Trapper sighed and leaned back, closing his eyes, blacking out the cabin and this weird, pontificating version of Hawkeye. Maybe if he bumped him on the head he'd go back to the alcoholic degenerate he left in Korea. It worked on _The Flintstones_. Behind his eyelids, he heard Hawkeye entertaining the kid with some rattely thing.

"It's funny," Trapper finally said. "That's sort of what Louise said. Or what she meant, or something. I don't know."

"What did she -- Trap!"

Trapper was saved from answering by the loudest, driest wood crack he'd ever heard. His eyes snapped open. Hawkeye was moving but his path was blocked by Sunny. The crate was splintering, Trapper realized. So what? It's just a stupid -- oh. Before Hawkeye could prevent it, but long after Trapper could have moved his leg, the stupid awful clay oven slid off of the crate. It didn't crack because something soft broke its fall. Namely, Trapper's shin.

Well that was dumb.

The baby was crying. The pain was intense but Trapper didn't really feel like reacting. Tears rolled up in the corners of his eyes. It really hurt.

"You stupid idiot!" Hawkeye shouted, finally ambulatory. "Why didn't you move?"

Now he felt like moving.

"Ow ow ow friggin ow ow ow goddammit!" The pain was trapped in his chest and he had to yelp it out.

"Lena's going to let me have it," Hawkeye said. He was at the sideboard digging through a toolbox, pulling out bottles and reading them. "You, get over there!"

He pointed Trapper onto the tiny sofa. Having some doctorin' skills himself, Trapper sensibly elevated his leg on the arm. Hawkeye brought Trapper two tablets and a cup of water.

"Didn't you see it falling?" Hawkeye said.

Trapper shook his head. "I wasn't paying attention."

Hawkeye knelt by the leg dangling off the sofa arm. Trapper lifted up with a wince so Hawkeye could roll up his pantleg.

"I thought you seemed out of it," Hawkeye said. "What's with you?"

Hawkeye's hands smoothed over the bump. Trapper let his head fall back against the rough cushions. The beams of the ceiling crossed far up over his head and seemed very far away, hidden in shadows. Hawkeye rubbed the spot gently, cupping the area that was clearly getting a goose-egg.

"I don't have any ice," Hawkeye said from the floor.

"It's okay," Trapper said. "That feels nice."

Hawkeye always had a nice touch, a reassuring presence. He was a tactile sort of person. Trapper remembered that time in Korea when there had been no heat oil and they had all bunked together in one tent. They'd been so cold they shared the blanket for warmth, just as some of the other guys had. It just felt right to push his back against Hawkeye's whole warm back. Comforting. Not sexual. There was a lot of times when a little touch from Hawkeye had made his day a little brighter, a little easier. He'd missed Hawkeye when the supply truck came and they'd gone back to sleeping in their own bunks. Did Hawkeye remember that?

Trapper said, "She called me a machoistic piece of shit."

"Huh?"

"Louise."

Hawkeye didn't laugh. He gazed at Trapper steady on with nothing but concern and sympathy.

"Was that the last time you talked to her?" Hawkeye said, rubbing his leg in a sympathetic way.

"More or less," Trapper said to the ceiling, fingers laced over his eyes. "We had words at the settlement, but they weren't worth anything. She got the house. I got out."

Trapper dropped his arms and let his head droop onto his shoulder. His skeleton felt too heavy to support. There was a spring poking his liver but he couldn't care much.

Hawkeye squeezed Trapper's forearm, caressing the underside with his thumb. Hawkeye had the longest fingers Trapper had ever seen. He had forgotten how all of Hawkeye's parts seemed lopey, like they were held to the bone with stretched out rubber bands. He wondered if a lifetime of a floppy body like that made it easier for Hawkeye to be affectionate with anyone. With men.

"I'm really sorry, Trap."

Trapper scrubbed at his eyes. There must be a lot of dust in here.

"So why'd you pick this crazy camp?" Trapper said.

Hawkeye smiled. "You mean why'd I find my own little corner of Korea in the backwoods of Maine?"

"I didn't say that."

"But you were thinking it."

"Maybe I did find a certain similarity," Trapper said.

"Believe me, it's not at all how I saw it. This place is paradise compared to Uijeongbu or even Orcotuna."

"Where's that?" Trapper jammed his arm under his neck to prop his head up.

"Peru, where Lena found me. I was there with IMPAct for the TB outbreak --"

"What who?"

"IMPAct. International Medical Personnel Action corps."

"Government?"

Hawkeye feigned the vapors. "You think so little of me?"

"Certainly not."

"Lena was setting up a Head Start program in the same village, you know, get some grassroots education going. We realized a lot of our goals overlapped. You could say she rescued me, put up a mirror of myself so I could see all my anger from the war was, well. Sometimes anger is good, it makes a person want to take action. But sometimes . . ." Hawkeye looked past Trapper out the window. "She's a very understanding woman. So she tolerated me for a disastrous stay in Connecticut, and then I followed her back here to write my book."

Trapper understood about a third of what was coming out of Hawkeye's mouth. Despite his international conferences, in very pretty hotels where he never had to learn a foreign language, he felt very sheltered. Hawkeye seemed to have been sleeping in every cot in every fleapit in the third world. So why did he start writing Trapper out of the blue? Hawkeye's eyes glittered, and he leaned forward while he spoke, hands clasped in front of him, fingers flexing as if anxious to wring the neck of the future. Trapper felt inexplicably jealous.

"I see," Trapper said.

"Does your leg hurt?" Hawkeye said.

"No, it's feeling a lot better, thanks."

Trapper was putting this all together in his head. How does a guy talk about a woman like that, knowing she's cheating on him?

"I'm sorry it's not working out, then," Trapper said.

"What's not working out?" Hawkeye said.

Trapper shrugged. "Well, you said --"

Hawkeye waved a hand. "Lena and I are doing fine. I've just got to work through some stuff. It's all about me, really, not about her and me."

Trapper rubbed his mustache. "Seems to me, that's what a guy says when the girl side of the 'he said she said' is saying it's all his fault. I mean, she went and got a new guy. That can't feel too good."

"Well, no, we both did."

"Huh?"

Hawkeye blinked at him. "You said you knew what free love is."

"Yeah, it's when you've got permission to screw around."

Hawkeye shook his head. "Look, first there was Lena plus Hawkeye, okay? Then we met Siva and he was having a bad time, he was a single father at age twenty-four. Then it was Lena, Hawkeye, and our adopted family. Then . . . things happened. But now . . . that's sort of all over again."

Trapper stared through him. "What're you telling me?"

"I'm telling you Lena doesn't have a boyfriend, she's got an ex, at least in the romantic sense. And he's my ex too. And we're all one big happy family who isn't sleeping together anymore."

Trapper wished for a scotch. "I don't get it."

"Trap . . . It doesn't matter, okay?"

"You're telling me you've got a -- that you're a --"

"I'm telling you that this is the sexual revolution and we're two adults and I know you, Trapper John McIntyre, former patron of the Missy Mushroom Geisha House, and this not as confusing as you're making it out to be."

Trapper pressed his lips together. "That was a long time ago."

Hawkeye sighed. He leaned back against the couch, away from Trapper. He began stacking the shattered bits of the stool into kindling for the fireplace. Trapper felt a little guilty, which reminded him of another, similar incident with his friend, almost as long ago as that night in Tokyo with those geishas who had a few things the typical geishas didn't. . . .

"Look, I'm sorry, Hawk," he said, "I'm just a little confused."

"I didn't expect to tell you right away," Hawkeye said. "I didn't think it would be a big deal."

Trapper watched his old friend's familiar gentle, dexterous hands, stack the wood into a careful pyramid so air would get up under when it was lit.

"Because it's not a big deal to you," Trapper said.

"I guess it is to you," Hawkeye said. He didn't sound angry. Maybe a little disappointed.

"It isn't," Trapper said. "It's, I mean. I just got dragged through a divorce where more than two people in a relationship is a big, expensive deal to some low lives who get paid more per hour than the most talented plastic surgeon in my entire hospital. And you're telling me that love can be a three way street?"

Hawkeye turned, his expression turning soft from memory. "You'll meet them at the party tonight. Siva, his son Jeremiah. He's like a nephew to me -- Lena gets to see him every day in school. He's so smart, Trap. They're Black and they both have these gorgeous green eyes."

Trapper smiled. "How old is he?"

"Seven, going on fifteen. He's the reason I wanted one of my own."

Trapper reached over and clapped Hawkeye on the shoulder. "I guess I'll believe it when I see it."


	2. Chapter 2

Title: "Marigold Wine" part 2/?  
Pairing: Hawkeye/Trapper, Hawkeye/others  
Genre: Drama, romance, longfic, postseries, 60s  
Summary: In the 60s, Trapper visits his old army buddy at a hippie commune, where Hawkeye has retreated to find peace.  
Rating: R/M

Trapper retreated to Hawkeye's little bedroom to unpack, but discovered that Hawkeye lived out of a blue footlocker and a constellation of mismatched hooks on the wall. Trapper shoved his suitcase into a corner and collapsed on the bed. He'd been traveling since nine that morning -- the four and a half hour drive to Farmington, the he had to wait the better part of the afternoon in the soda shop, tired and eating the worst burger he'd ever tasted, while that kid took his sweet time coming down the mountain on the terrible old Army surplus ATV. His knee ached where he's torn the ligament twenty-five years ago, and a bone-deep exhaustion was seeping into his bones even as his mind whirled.

Trapper found a novel to distract himself while Hawkeye "went out for dinner," whatever that meant. But his eyes wouldn't fix on the page. Trapper had to admit that Hawkeye's "free love" was tailor-made for a man who had never intended to settle down. Hawkeye loved to be loved, and loved to give it. But what did it mean to have an ex family, a former nephew, and a former . . . whatever -- a twenty-six year old man? Trapper repeatedly had to draw his curious mind away from involuntary lurid mental images. Okay, so his secretary was twenty-four. Was it any different that Hawkeye's twenty-year old was a guy? No. Be it either gender, sleeping with the young was nothing but trouble.

Trapper barely got past the first page of his book before the page blurred and reality drew far away. . . .

When he opened his eyes again, it was dark. Someone had shut the window. Trapper lay there still, appreciating the cloudy comfort of a feather bed, fingering the knots of the afghan. Something firm, round, and hot pressed against the small of his back. He poked it experimentally and it meowed. Ah. Probably not a bomb, baby, or tiny woman, the three things that would require he get up. A fire crackled beyond his curtain; as his eyes adjusted, he could discern the warm yellow glow on the ceiling.

A gurgle beside and below him. Trapper stilled. He knew that sleepy sound. If you played dead, they might not find you.

No go. Pierce's clever child sensed a woken adult the way a bear sniffs out meat in the wilderness. With true dread, Trapper listened to the howling rear up as he prayed that someone else would take care of it. He had never been fond of babies, not really. According to Louise, he wasn't fond of children at all.

It didn't take a moment for the curtain to be pulled aside and someone picked the kid up. Lena, by the delicate movements. Pink light shone behind his eyelids.

"Trapper," she said gently, sing-songing, like a mother would.

Trapper played dead, just in case.

"My new friend, dinner is ready."

Trapper sat up. "Okay."

"I knew that would rouse him," Hawkeye called from without.

In the main room, Trapper stared, stunned. The cabin was transported. Candlelight flickered in tandem with the pinky glow from the fireplace. The table was heavy with lovely smelling foods: A braided bread, apples with honey, a green salad with a confetti of veggies, and stew that looked like squash with raisins. There was a bottle of wine on the table -- finally, some alcohol.

"Looks great," he said.

"Sit sit," Lena said.

Trapper sat next to Lena, reaching over to smooth the hair on Sunny's sleepy head. The baby grabbed a linen napkin and stuck it in his mouth. It looked like it had been a man's work shirt in a former life, cut and hemmed with a discordant fabric. Someone made the effort to do that, and wash them after each use, so there was less trash to fill up a landfill.

"Is there a kitchen hiding around here somewhere?" he said.

"This is what a community is for," Lena said.

Hawkeye, serving, said, "The stew went in the over that tried to kill you and we all pitch in at the bakery. Lena gave Grandma Pearl half of her second most enormous squash for the apples, and we traded Willow our blackberries for his salad greens."

"I take my class blackberry hunting, they find all the little spots," Lena said.

"Seems involved," Trapper said. What he meant was, a whole lot of work just for one meal.

"It's an economy that respects everyone involved," Lena said. "There are no minimum wage employees, no corporate farms. We sustain ourselves."

"We eat most of our meals communally," Hawkeye said. "So it's less effort on any one person. But we wanted to have a special dinner for your first night."

"He wanted to throw you to the wolves," Lena said. And untied her blouse. Trapper looked away, quickly. Sunny expertly pulled the cloth down and there was her breast, pale and exposed. Wasn't Sunny too old for that now? Louise only did that for a month or two and had always in the back bedroom. Lena gracefully ate left-handed over her son's busy head.

"The wolves?" he said, concentrating on being sophisticated and less a letch than his natural tendency would lead him to be.

"You'll see," Hawkeye said. "There's a hootenanny tonight."

* * *

Hawkeye held up a ventilated coffee can with a candle in it to light their way to the 'hootenanny.' The night was glorious, fresh, clear, warm enough for t-shirts. The men wore sneakers, Lena wore a summer dress, and the baby wore a torn shirt diaper.

When the path opened to the compound where Trapper had first arrived, Hawkeye blew out the candle. In the dark, the place didn't look so dank and muddy, especially with the cheery Chinese lanterns lit up in the trees. The woods were green and blooming, especially in the compound.

Music drifted up from the long metal building, and Trapper had been partially right about the Frankenstein structure -- the top half of the front wall propped open to an awning. He could see dancing couples and a barrel of blessed beer. A gaggle of girls whooped it up on the porch as they approached. Hawkeye waved and Trapper gave his very nicest smile, knowing he still had that magic touch. Lena ran ahead to greet them like a girl.

"A word, Trap?" Hawkeye snagged at Trapper's shirt.

Trapper was led over to one side of what he was starting to think of as the "courtyard," a pebbled area near the tall statue, standing under the light of a green lantern hung in a huge oak tree.

"What's up?" Trapper said, already distracted by the music and crowd. This must be what 'come out of the woodwork' meant.

"I just wanted you to be up with things: this place isn't like our gin-soaked forget-me-please parties in the war."

Trapper indicated the one-year-old making an acrobatic escape from Hawkeye's chest-sling. "I noticed a few differences."

Hawkeye touched his arm. "It's just -- whatever idea I gave you about the place, there's a difference between free love and loose morals. There's rules. You can't just cozy up to some woman and go back to her cabin."

Trapper almost laughed aloud, despite Hawkeye's pleading expression -- perhaps _because_ of those bleeding-heart puppy dog eyes. "Look, Hawk, what you're saying is sort of contrary to everything you've already told me."

"Trapper -- this is a society, it isn't summer camp. You don't know what's going on between people, who's emotionally connected to whom --"

Trapper put a hand up. "If you're saying that I should get to know a woman first because I don't know who she belongs to, then all right. I promise not to make a play for anyone tonight." He tossed off a sarcastic Boy Scout's salute. "Savvy?"

Hawkeye rubbed his forehead like he already had the hangover he was supposed to be enjoying getting tonight. "No one 'belongs to' anyone, you generational holdover. But if that's how you have to think about it . . ."

"Onward?" Trapper headed for the wine, women, and song.

"Just a second." His personal wet blanket snatched his arm with the speed of an 80-year-old _oma_.

Trapper groaned.

"Just, one more thing. I don't want you to think . . . which is to say -- "

"Hawkeye, you're blushing."

"You cut that out! Look, these people are the most open-minded and kind you'll ever meet, but that doesn't mean certain things are common to them. Not to a man."

Trapper blinked at him.

"Certain things," Hawkeye repeated.

Trapper groped for possibilities. "No cock fights?"

"Trapper," Hawkeye said, irritated. "You can't go hitting on men, either."


	3. Chapter 3

Title: "Marigold Wine" part 3/?  
Pairing: Hawkeye/Trapper, Hawkeye/others  
Genre: Drama, romance, longfic, postseries, 60s  
Summary: In the 60s, Trapper visits his old army buddy at a hippie commune, where Hawkeye has retreated to find peace.  
Rating: R/M

Part 3

Trapper rolled back on his heels, gasping a laugh. He slapped Hawkeye on the shoulder. "Good one."

"Don't snicker," Hawkeye said. "We're two mature adults living in the modern sexual revolution."

"I don't know what you're talking about." Trapper started to walk away.

"Trapper, I lived three feet away from you for a year, don't think you were the Invisible Man."

Trapper stopped, sighed, looking up into the night. The stars were just hanging up there, doing their star thing. They'd be there in a million years, even if he killed his last, best friend in the world and buried his body in the wilderness.

Trapper wagged a finger at him. "That's pretty rich, coming from you. I'll meet you inside."

"You heard what I said?" Hawkeye was starting to sound like someone's dad.

"Yeah, I heard you," Trapper snapped.

An hour later, Trapper wasn't nearly as drunk as he'd hoped, and was thinking something he'd never thought he'd think:

So this is a drum circle.

Hawkeye was useless, bouncing the baby to the beat, attending to the kid's glee like it was the damn Captain Kangaroo hour. Was this music? Was this even organized noise?

There had been guitars earlier, a record player. Sure, the kids played those bugs from England but at least they had a melody. It got people moving. Now everyone was in a trance and the teenagers looked like they wanted to go home.

When he'd first arrived, Trapper had been surprised by the number of people. As annoyed as he'd been at Hawkeye, he'd relied on his old friend to introduce him around. All together, everyone looked like the college kids on the news, so many Indian print skirts, patched jackets, more of those bird tracks on everything. ("Peace sign," said a pretty girl sitting on her hair.) Lots of jangly jewelry so that it echoed all around him. He guessed there was probably a hundred people, including teenagers, plus little kids, in the metal longhouse. Almost immediately, he could feel a fine line of sweat cooling at his forehead.

Trapper circulated to the back of the room, leaving Hawkeye to his natural niche at the social gravitational center. The beer barrel turned out to be a keg of bitter yellow wine, marigold or dandelion, or maybe both, served up by an old woman with flowing silver hair. One thing he'd learned in his years of growing up post-Korea was that you didn't learn anything about people if you were trying to be the loudest person in the room. He mooched along the edge of things, looking for someone to talk to.

He lingered at a loud cluster of artists. They were hard to miss, the largest contingent by numbers, Trapper realized, to the point of ego-centrism. Every conversation he initiated led to someone asking him if he was working on a project. They seemed to only ask it as an excuse to talk about theirs. Trapper didn't really get it and didn't really care to. Their overenthused optimism, their belief that they could create something beautiful out of their own two hands and clever mind, made his respect for them plummet. They sounded like kids. He tried to resist thinking they should get back to their real jobs, but then wasn't Hawk on the same artistic sabbatical? what Hawkeye was doing? What was Hawkeye's story, anyway? What was he doing with these nuts, having a baby out here? Could he be sure that kid was even his?

After another glass of wine, Trapper resigned himself that hippy girls who believed in free love weren't as easy as he thought. He found himself holding up the wall with a couple of guys talking quietly amongst themselves. Trapper wondered if Hawkeye knew that there was a cluster of these supposed experimental types who were semiseriously talking about blowing up a nuclear power plant.

"You are so militaristic," one of the girls said, the one from earlier who tended to sit on her hair. Trapper liked her already.

"Attack behavior, not being," said her friend, a Black woman with a natural.

"Fine, they are _behaving_ militaristically," Hair Sitter amended.

"So what if I am," said the boy. He had hair between nice college boy and a moptop, so it flew out at all angles. "We have to protect ourselves here."

"This isn't the plains of the Yuan Dynasty-era China, there are no Mongols!" Hair Sitter said.

"Um, I believe that was the Khan dynasty, _Bethany_," said Wing-Haired Boy.

"There was no Khan Dynasty, _Robert_," said Miss Black Natural. "That's like saying the King Lineage. Khan is a designation, not a family name."

College kids, Trapper thought. They're playing that game where the one who wins is the one with the most educated-sounding reference crammed into his sentence. He and Hawkeye had had a decidedly different tactic with the brass who got too high on their shinies.

"I told you, it's 'Osiris'," Robert said. "'Robert' is my slave name."

"Oh please," Miss Natural said.

"That's right," Bethany Long Hair said. "Professor Georges thinks that --"

"But Robert's right," Natural said, going in for the kill. Bethany's eye's narrowed. "This commune can't waste materials on too many outside groups. We're struggling with allocation of resources as it is. And we still haven't solidified our central motto or elected a permanent leadership. What's going to happen if another outside group comes back and tests our convictions gain?"

Trapper reached through their threesome, taking a bottle of wine off the table between them.

"Seems to me," he said, "that what we're all convicted to do here is sow some love. And if you don't mind an observation from an outsider, the main conviction between all three of you is that Mr. Robert Osiris Cut Your Hair is a dreamboat."

The girls squawked.

"And you," he indicated Miss Natural with his drink, "are quite irritated that young Robert is sowing a bit more love with your friendly enemy Bethany than he is with you."

Miss Natural flashed her eyes at him, reminding him of a Houlihan death glare fired over her surgical mask. Bethany crossed her legs and arms, turning her back on Robert.

"You can have him," she said to Miss Natural. "Sowing love with him is like getting plowed by Old Willow's diesel tractor."

'Osiris' didn't take well to that at all.

Trapper moved to another corner. Some younger kids were playing the record player, to the tolerance of the adults. From their chatter, they seemed far more blasé about this whole commune thing. It wasn't an experiment to them, it was just life. They were most excited to show off their 45's for each other. Trapper smiled at a little girl with daisies braided into her hair.

"Is that the Crickets?" he called to her.

"No, man, the Crickets are old news!" said the boy she was generally jiggling near.

They didn't touch when they danced. When he was eleven, his mother had made him take ballroom dancing lessons; he wore a suit with short pants and his partner was his cousin who wore white lace gloves. He had had to hold her back with a handkerchief.

"Beatles, then?" Trapper said.

"'I Wanna Hold Your Hand'!" the girl cried.

Trapper couldn't help but grin back at their youth, their unwrinkled joy. "I think _he_ does."

He'd bought a few of those buggy LPs for his girls at Christmas, or birthdays, or sometimes just whenever. How could he say no when his girls were crying silently on the living room carpet during Ed Sullivan? He had the money, not like these kids shuffling through their 45s like baseball cards. They might have killed themselves without the LPs. Louise, in another life, might have said something cute like, 'They'll kill themselves _with_ the LPs.' But he and Louise weren't saying cute things by the time rock and roll singers were making girls cry in front of the television set.

So he spoiled them. So what. If a little music could make their lives brighter when Mommy and Daddy were shouting awful things to each other in the next room, then he'd buy the damn records at import prices.

Trapper continued his counterclockwardly exploration of the room.

Against the wall that divided the room from the kitchen, hitched onto the wide plank of a service window, Lena was talking to that elderly poet couple he'd met in the compound. Feeling herself being watched, Trapper caught Lena's eye. She raised her glass to him, and he returned the gesture. With a smile, she beckoned him over. He watched her speak to her friends as he approached. He wondered how she was explaining him to them.

Trapper loped over.

"Hi."

Mrs. Robinson kissed him on the cheek. "Trapper is Hawkeye's absolutely oldest friend, so we want to hear all about his soldiering past."

Trapper shook his head. "I don't know about that, we were hardly regular army."

"I was in France in '13," Mr. Robinson said. "Terrible war."

"Yes, sir, it was," Trapper said, shaking his hand.

Mrs. Robinson said, "Tell me, how is your son?"

Trapper blinked. "Ah, I don't have a son, ma'am, just the two daughters. Cathy's in nursing school in Massachusetts and Becky's, ah, finding herself."

"Lovely, just lovely," she said. "Mr. Robinson and I are so enjoying the company of you young people, and all these new babies. We think you kids really know what you're talking about, with the free expression and sexual intercourse."

Trapper hid his expression in his drink. Lena made a show of scratching her nose to hide her lips. "Yes, ma'am. Plenty of that to go around."

"I was in France in '13," Mr. Robinson said.

Trapper looked him over. "I see."

Mrs. Robinson handed Lena her drink. "Mr. Robinson, twirl me around the dance floor, would you please?"

They foxtrotted away, light on their feet as if it was V-J Day.

Trapper and Lena held each other's gaze for a beat. They couldn't hold it. They broke down, giggling, Lena holding on to Trapper's shoulder so she didn't slide off the sill.

"Are you sure they're okay to live alone?" Trapper said, hiccuping.

"They're really very healthy," Lena said through gasps. "Except he's nearly deaf. She shouldn't drink with her medication."

Trapper lost it again, hiding from the Robinsons, laughing between Lena's shoulder and the shuttered service window. Lena leaned on him, impotently shushing him through her own laughter.

"They're really very nice," she said. "Lovely poets."

"What are they doing here?" he said.

"They come to get away from the city and write their poetry. They say they don't like hot climates like your -- the place with Mickey Mouse?"

"Florida," Trapper said. "The Happiest Swamp on Earth." He looked up at her, red nose and messy chignon and all. "I think you just may be the most fun person I've met here tonight."

Lena smiled, touched the side of his face. "So, Mr. Trapper John. Where did you get such a terrible nick name?"

Trapper lounged back against the sill, hitching his elbows on it. "Let's just say, in my youth I was a great gaming man."

"Trout?"

"Mermaids."

Lena seemed to consider that. "I don't believe you, but I think it interesting you should pick such a outrageous lie."

Trapper shrugged. "So where are you from? You got family around here?"

Lena twirled her drink on her knee, leaving a ring of condensation on her peasant skirt. "I no longer have a family."

Trapper nodded. "I'm sorry." German Jewish name, stupid question.

Lena touched his arm to show she didn't mind. "My brother and I were sent to a farm in the English countryside during the war, and we were eventually adopted. After the war, I looked for my parents but learned that everyone had gone."

"I'm sorry." Tragedy rolled to Hawkeye like golf balls to mine fields.

She sipped her drink and tucked a blonde strand behind her ear. "I was so little, I wouldn't have remembered them anyway. My brother found good work in England with the railway, I get his letters sometimes. I came to America for school, to be a teacher, and then fell into Head Start, so I could help lost children like me make their own lives."

"That's very noble," Trapper said.

Lena shook her head. "Hawkeye and I, we are still looking for a home. Or perhaps, we're still trying to create one."

Trapper nodded. "But . . . last I heard, your home and his home aren't the same one."

Lena smiled. "I love Hawkeye very much. My life is with him. But . . . in the last year, he has created a dark room in our house --"

"Metaphorically."

"Yes. And it is his job to make it go away." She slung her arm through his elbow. "I'm very glad his good friend could come see him right now."

Trapper took a long pull from his wine. Thoughtfully, he said, "Where I come from, boy meets girl, they get married, they get miserable, and they stick it out until they die."

Lena nudged him. "Is anyone really happy like that? What about the children? And what about the people you loved before? You said 'boy meets girl.' What if boys meets a girl who has a boy and they all love each other?"

"Huh?" Trapper said. That wasn't where his mind was headed when she questioned his 'boy meets girl' dynamic.

"In Germany, before the war, the intellectuals talked about the concept of 'polyamory,' or many loves. Have you heard of this?"

Trapper shrugged. "Sort of. In books. I didn't think people really pulled it off."

Lena smiled. "Oh, people do. Very well, in fact."

"But how --"

"There's my girl!"

A tall Black man with close-cropped hair was crossing the room, arms raised, a little boy trailing behind. He hugged Lena, nearly picking her up, and kissed her on the zygomatic process of her maxilla, leaving a wine stain under her eye. She scrubbed at it with her heel of her palm, leaving one side of her face brighter than the other.

"Are we dancing?" the guy asked.

"No, we're talking," Trapper said, irritated. He hated when some guy comes in to horn in on your girl who isn't even yours.

Lena indicated between the two men with free hand while she rested the other around this new guy's neck.

"Trapper John McIntyre, this is Siva, my dear and closest friend. And this young man is --"

"Hi. I'm Jeremiah." The kid was hip-high and wiry with his father's striking green eyes. He had a wide, shy smile as he hid behind his father's leg.

Trapper shook both their hands. He made much of Jeremiah as being quite tall for his age, and what did he want to be when he grew up?

"I'm going to be a doctor like Hawkeye." Jeremiah shyly hung off his father's very strong arm.

Siva was taller than Trapper, but not by much. He was Black, of course, seeing as Jeremiah was as well and that's how things tended to work out. He was wearing one of those Indian print shirts with the folded-over v-neck, and a necklace with a heavy looking carved charm that was those Hindu curly letters. He was trim in the waist, wide-eyed, a little on the skinny side. Trapper supposed he was good-looking, but not in a movie star way.

"Honey, why don't you go play with the kids." Siva indicated the record-playing adolescents.

"They're bigger than me."

Siva kissed the top of Jeremiah's head. "Nah, go find Sassafras, he's right over there, see?"

Siva sent the slightly nervous boy across the room, watching him go. Once Jeremiah thought he was out of his father's sight, he gained his wings and latched onto a boy who looked about his age. Holding hands, they took to the records together.

An awkward moment hung.

Trapper groped for conversation. "Some party, huh?"

Siva smiled and his whole face changed. Trapper could see a kid who played stickball and got scolded by his mother in those round cheeks.

"This place is too much hard work sometimes!" He dangled his arm around Lena. "We need our wine and music."

"Here, here," Lena said, clinking her glass with his.

The mood lightened. They were three people sharing a drink now.

"So," Siva said, "Hawkeye said you met in Korea?"

Trapper nodded. "We were stationed at the same M.A.S.H. unit. We were doctors, meatball surgery."

"What a terrible way to describe medicine," Lena said.

Trapper considered that. "Well, I guess it's not party talk. Let's just say it was a lot of twelve, fifteen, twenty hour shifts, no more than an hour or so on a patient. You get to know a guy in that kind of situation. We were bunkmates, too. So we kind of lived in each other's skin. It was unavoidable that we'd become friends."

"Kind of like a really bad sleepover camp," Siva said. "You end up friends with your bunkie in rebellion against the tyrannical counselor."

"Sure, if the girls' camp across the pond is lobbing shells at you, then that's pretty much it. Plus, our tyrannical counselor lived with us."

Siva nodded. "Ah. Well, I never went to camp, but in Chicago, the girls in the apartments used to throw water balloons at the boys out of their windows."

Trapper laughed. "The boys they liked, or the ones they didn't?"

"Depended on if it was ninety-two in August or thirty-three below freezing in winter."

Lena laughed.

"Those girls meant business," Trapper said.

"Perhaps the boys were the busy ones and the girls merely defending themselves," Lena said.

Siva kissed her temple. "They never threw balloons at me, so I guess I wouldn't know."

Lena leaned into the kiss this time. "Trapper, if you will excuse us, I believe this is our song."

"And away you go." Trapper secretly doubted "Hats Off to Larry" was anyone's song.

"I'm glad Hawkeye has a good friend visiting," Siva said to Trapper in passing. His tone was so ardent, Trapper wasn't sure how to respond.

"Sure," he said. "We were close as two guys could get."

Siva gave him a curious look Trapper couldn't interpret. Lena and Siva danced off together, doing a very precise step that Trapper had seen his girls practice in the living room. They seemed to concentrate so hard on doing the step correctly, they weren't even smiling. Didn't anyone do the Lindy anymore?

It was getting late. Where was Hawkeye? Trapper hadn't heard his braying laugh rise over the crowd in at least half an hour.

Eventually the adults had enough of the dippy music and declared the record played closed for the evening. Trapper hadn't realized he'd been standing aside for several minutes, watching the dancers change their steps, pouring more wine from his bottle. He spotted Hawkeye perched on table, Sunny dozing against his chest, chatting with a guy holding a guitar. A little girl in a sundress, with her hair pulled to one side across her forehead, came up behind the guy hugged him around the neck. Trapper smiled and tried not to ache too much.

The man got down on one knee to be at his daughter's level and whispered something to her. The crowd hushed as she spoke.

"Um. My daddy just got home from being in V-Vietnam," she said, "to be a soldier there. In the Marines. And he wrote this song. So, um, we're going to sing it."

The man strummed a few notes until the little girl seemed confident to start. The song was pretty, folky, old fashioned yet a la mode. Her reedy voice rose over his confident baritone. The little girl seemed to keep her place well as long as she watched her daddy and ignored the hundred people staring at them. Trapper moved along the edge of the room toward Hawkeye.

"Spend my days just searching, spend my nights in dreams," they sang  
"I don't know where I'll be tomorrow, but I know I'd like to see them again."

Trapper slid onto the bench beside Hawkeye, hip to hip on a crowded bench in the middle of a clutch of people who had gathered close to hear the performance. It was a mature song coming from a young man and a little girl, about the parts of us we brought home and the parts we left behind. There were little bits of Pierce and McIntyre still there in the mud, the Sea of Japan, the tents that still stood in Uijeongbu; and they brought home bits of Korea in their skin, their politics, their nightmares, and their mistakes.

Trapper felt Hawkeye's hand reach over and slide down his wrist, find his hand below the table. Trapper turned it over, palm to palm against Hawkeye's, and squeezed. He held on for a moment to Hawkeye's shaking hand between their bodies, surrounded by the crowd. Hawkeye kissed Sunny on the forehead; his blue eyes glistened in the dim light.

The song finished to thunderous applause.

The little girl, beaming with pride, was made much of as a budding folk sensation. A woman -- clearly her mother -- took her by the hand and led her out into the summer night.

The guitarman stuck around and a few drummers joined him in the vaguely stage-like area at the center of the room to take requests from the crowd. Dancing started in the middle, solo jigglers, one ballerina, and a couple jitterbugging. It took Trapper a while to realize that that _was _the band. They played what he thought of as country music, about farming and "the man."

"How's your leg?" Hawkeye said.

"Hm?" Trapper had forgotten about the dent. "Feeling no pain."

"As you like it," Hawkeye said.

There were other songs as he sat hip to hip with Hawkeye and pretending the backs of their hands were brushing by accident. Songs about friendship, home, protest, politics. Songs about girls, sex, food. Songs Trapper could get behind. He believed in the Civil Rights movement. He'd sent checks to Dr. King. He couldn't say that the only reason he'd washed up on Pierce's kibbutz was because of his own loss; the government's second attempt at a ground war in Asia was making reality a little harder to face than coming home from the first one had.

So maybe he wasn't just vacationing. Maybe these people had something to say, a valid perspective or two.

At least, that's how Trapper felt until the guitarist left. By now the drum circle was building to some sort of mass orgasm.


	4. Chapter 4

Title: "Marigold Wine" part 4/?  
Pairing: Hawkeye/Trapper, Hawkeye/others  
Genre: Drama, romance, longfic, postseries, 60s  
Summary: In the 60s, Trapper visits his old army buddy at a hippie commune, where Hawkeye has retreated to find peace.  
Rating: R/M

"Hope you didn't mind me pulling you out of there," Trapper said as they bumped up the path. "Where had all those drums come from? They all had them hidden somewhere, maybe up their big skirts. It was like a musical monster, you know? A rhythmic wraith."

"S'all right. Once they get to the drumming, it's all downhill." Hawkeye stumbled on the ruts in the path. Trapper grabbed his elbow and pulled him closer, supporting him.

They'd left the candle in the coffee can with Lena because she was taking Sunny tonight. Once lightened of his kidly burden, Hawkeye spent the last half hour with his head stuck in the marigold wine barrel.

"You really shouldn't drink so much, you're a family man now," Trapper said.

"I'm not that blunk," Hawkeye said. He giggled. "Did you hear what I said?"

"Yeah, I heard it."

"I'm no fambly man, not tonight," Hawkeye announced to the world.

He knew Hawkeye wasn't that drunk because he had been fine when he'd been sitting still; a thoughtful sitting Hawkeye and troublemaking standing Hawkeye is a Hawkeye with less than half a bottle in him. He'd sleep it off and be irritatingly bright in the morning.

Hawkeye's porch light was a welcome destination at the top of Mount goddamn Olympus, who the hell planted this place in the Himalayas? Hawkeye leaned on Trapper's shoulder while he took his sneakers off. Trapper didn't mind so much holding on to Hawkeye while he toed off his own shoes. There were all kinds of marigolds in his belly, too.

"Nightcap?" Hawkeye said.

Trapper shrugged. "Sure, why not."

"Wait out here. I don't do them in the house."

Puzzled, Trapper hitched himself into the only furniture on the porch, a frame hammock. He leaned back and rested on a folded crocheted afghan. The hammock went two ways and the porch went two more so did that mean he was in 4D?

When the door opened again and Hawkeye emerged, Trapper was struck dumb. Hawkeye hadn't brought out glasses or a bottle, but wood box the size of a deck of cards. He shook it and something inside rattled. He pulled a Zippo lighter from his shirt pocket.

"Do you wish to partake?"

Trapper sat up to give Hawkeye room on the hammock. "Are those marijuana cigarettes?"

The little box was carved wood and shut with a little eye clasp. Hawkeye shook one out, gazing at Trapper up from under his bangs like the cat who found a nest of canaries and didn't feel a bit of guilt. "Is this your first time?"

Trapper licked his lips. "Just since college. One of the guys always had some, but I only did it once. We sat around reading _Alice in Wonderland_ to find hidden meaning. It was the worst high of my life."

"Really?"

Trapper smirked. "I was a good boy."

'I'll bet." Hawkeye put the little rolled cigarette between his lips and lit up.

"I didn't want to screw up my ride." Trapper watched the end light up as Hawkeye puffed it. "Give that here."

Hawkeye passed the cigarette over. Trapper took it awkwardly. It was smaller than a tobacco cigarette, he'd never held a rolled one before. He almost dropped it on his pants.

"Are you sure it's okay to mix these?" Trapper gestured in the general direction of the drumming noises where the marigold wine lived.

"A little nonsense now and then is cherished by the wisest men," Hawkeye said.

"How much wine did you have, anyway?"

"Just a glass," Hawkeye said.

"Really?"

Hawkeye gave him weird eyes, like he was caught with his hand in something. "Yeah."

Trapper realized Hawkeye was waiting anxiously for Trapper to take a drag. Hawkeye lit the end of it again and Trapper inhaled.

Pain. It felt like tiny hot knives going down his lungs. He coughed, trying to hack up the painful pieces. Did he suck in the seeds or something?

"Are you trying to kill me?" Trapper said.

"Relax." Hawkeye put a hand on his chest. "Take it slow. You have to get used to it."

Eyes watering, trusting Hawkeye more than he thought wise, Trapper tried again. He sucked softly this time, not expecting it taste smooth like a commercial cigarette. He watched Hawkeye's approving gaze looming just inches from him.

"Now hold it in," Hawkeye said softly.

Trapper held the hot smoke inside him for a beat. He exhaled slowly. His head seemed to unscrew just a little. Hawkeye seemed both far away and very, very relevant.

"That better?" Hawkeye said.

Trapper grinned. "Finest kind."

Hawkeye smiled in approval. "That's my boy. C'mere."

Hawkeye, a wriggler at heart, arranged them on the hammock. Trapper moved to lie at opposite ends, but Hawkeye pointed out that they couldn't pass the cigarette that way. "No one ought to support their own body weight when smoking one of these," Hawkeye decreed. So instead they laid comfortably shoulder to shoulder, passing a joint on a balmy June night.

Hawkeye wanted to talk about why they were here, as in the Sitsips Commune as a whole. Also pollution, nuclear power, and single-sex education. Trapper was having a hard time following; fortunately Hawkeye liked to poke a body when he was high and pontificating. Trapper took that as his cue to say "that's interesting" or "I see what you mean." Trapper considered this was a pattern of his -- someone pokes him and out pops a response. Louise liked to poke. And boy, could she get the response she wanted.

"Do you see what complete insanity that is?" Hawkeye said. Possibly. It sounded like something Hawkeye would say, or had said this evening, possibly several times.

"That's interesting."

"You think it's interesting that the government can still draft these kids at eighteen but they can't vote to _not be drafted_ until they're twenty-one?"

"I don't want to talk about that."

Hawkeye blinked, twisting to get a look at him.

Trapper looked up at the porch ceiling. "How come you don't put a windchime or something out here? This whole camp is artistic except for your front porch."

Hawkeye settled down again, brushing his shoulder against Trapper's. "I'm sorry. I don't know how I got on that."

"You were talking about asbestos in schools." Trapper rooted around in Hawkeye's jacket pocket, not bothering to ask for that little box. If he had to listen to this, he was starting another cigarette.

"It's true, you know," Hawkeye said. "We fought for freedom and apple pie and we get asbestos in our building materials."

"Look, do you think we can moor you onto one subject heading? I'll provide the rope. Where's the Zippo?"

Hawkeye passed it over. "Are you high enough to talk about Louise?"

"No."

"All right. How're the girls taking it?"

Trapper took a long pull off the cigarette. He passed it over.

"Cathy's okay," he said. "She's in nursing school at Boston College, full tuition on account of my veteran status. Isn't bringing any boys home, but that's all right with me. She's too smart for any jokers at her age. She'll be done in a year, I know a guy who's going to put her to work right away. She wants to work in pedes."

"Good department," Hawkeye said with a little less enthusiasm than people usually mustered up for Trapper's daughter the brilliant nurse.

"Yeah," Trapper said. "Kids are good work. Easy."

Hawkeye didn't respond to that.

A loud group of teenagers scuffed up the road beyond Hawkeye's yard, kicking up stones and singing loudly. Gradually, their exuberance faded into the night.

"How about Becky?" Hawkeye said.

"Becky. . . ." Trapper took a long draw from his cigarette. "Says to call her 'Rebecca' now. I don't know what's going on with her."

Trapper watched Hawkeye flick the first joint off into the bushes, and passed over the second one. He tucked one arm behind his head and stared off at the sky. He'd never seen so many stars, not since he was a kid and they'd visit his grandparents at the beach on Cape Cod. He could almost smell the sand and the dune grass.

Hawkeye hitched himself up onto his elbow, a great feat for someone with as many seditative chemicals in his brain. He touched Trapper where the lines intersected on his forehead with the cool end of the lighter. "What're you seeing in there?"

Behind closed eyes, Trapper felt the cool metal smooth the furrows on his brow. Tension he didn't know he was carrying ebbed away. There's approximately ninety muscles in the human face. Each one was attached to a nerve.

"I'm thinking that I came back home and my family was going on without me, and I didn't have a place in it. So I stayed away. I gave them all the -- the _junk_ they needed. But I wasn't around for any of the important stuff." Trapper opened his eyes.

Hawkeye looked down at him, curious and concerned. "Was that why you traveled?"

"Yeah." Europe, South America. Trapper had been everywhere but home.

Hawkeye fiddled with the hem of Trapper's overshirt. "My dad's disappointed that I moved away from him. Really, he's scared that there won't be anyone for him when he's old. Well, when he starts to die. He's already old. Getting sick and dying is just the next part, right? That's what we doctors predict."

"It's what we see."

"I stayed away too," Hawkeye said. "At first, it was because normal life seemed so boring and simple."

"The fifties _were_ boring and simple," Trapper said.

Hawkeye chuckled and they shared a moment. It wasn't easy to find many people who agreed that an automated kitchen doesn't make everything all better.

"I wanted to make a difference," Hawkeye said, "go somewhere that really needed me. So I did that, and now . . . Now I want to reflect on it. I want to write about it. I don't think I even know how to live in Crabapple Cove, or New York City, or anywhere else where there's normal people."

Trapper looked up over Hawkeye's head at the plank ceiling, thinking, drying out his prickling eyes. "Did you think we came here to run away from something, or run to something?"

Hawkeye smiled, wiping his face. "I came here to raise my kid away from all the assholes who . . . "

"Say it."

"All the assholes I'm afraid of."

Trapper thought back to the reunion, how out of place he felt around Margaret the accomplished diplomat, Radar and his wife, not to mention all those strangers who came after him, that Hunnicutt and his perfect family and big smile. And how in his element Hawkeye was, how quick he was with the fond remembrances, as if the shelling and the disease, the twenty hour surgery shifts, hadn't happened. How much he drank as the night started to close. Hawkeye did best in replications of Korea because the best part of him was built in Korea.

"What happened to you?" Trapper said.

Hawkeye shook his head. "I'll tell you another time."

"Oh." Trapper started to sit up.

"No," Hawkeye laid his hand on Trapper's chest. "I wasn't putting you off. I'm just so tired. Thank you. I appreciate all this listening you're so good at."

Trapper wasn't sure what to say to that, so instead he said, "I talked to Lena at the party."

"Yeah?"

Trapper wasn't sure if he should say anything. "Nothing."

"What?"

"Nothing. I just don't get this, where you got your new ideas about marriage and all."

"Because my old ones were so traditional?"

"Last I remember, you didn't have any," Trapper said.

"Maybe you just weren't listening."

"So tell me now."

Hawkeye nodded. "You saw Lena and Siva together. They can do whatever they want, it's good for her to have someone when I'm being such a prince to her."

"But he's her ex."

"Trapper. . . ." Hawkeye sighed. "He's my ex too."

Trapper glanced up at him. Looked away. "So you say."

"We were a family," Hawkeye said. "We're still a family, even if Mommy and Daddy said Daddy has to live in the suburbs."

"Yeah, but I didn't get -- I mean . . ."

"That's the point of free love."

"'Free' or 'cheap'?"

"Hey."

Trapper's mind turned over this new lifestyle that had grabbed Hawkeye like a duck to water. Sure, there was that time at the geisha drag bar in Tokyo. But your best buddy disappearing into the gents' for thirty minutes with a heavily made up geisha who's got an Adam's apple while you lost a hundred bucks at Go was one thing. A relationship? How . . . real.

Trapper closed his eyes, imagining this life. It coalesced as his daughter's old pink and yellow Barbie Dream House. Two Kens and a Barbie, baby Skipper and little Ricky. One Ken to make the mommy Barbie happy and another Ken to wrangle Skipper and Ricky. It sounded like a game for girls who had too many dolls.

Hawkeye found Trapper's hand in the darkness. He poked it, a little playfully and a little not. "Do you really think there's so little love in our hearts that we can only stingily give it to one person?"

Trapper flopped back. He passed the cigarette. "I don't know. It happened, okay? I'm not saying it didn't happen."

"What didn't?"

"Don't play dumb." Trapper took the cigarette back, grumpy and needing something to make him pretend this conversation wasn't happening.

Hawkeye blew smoke into the air, in more ways than one. "If you're afraid homosexuality is retroactively communicable through kiss --"

"Hawkeye, shut up, will you? You're not gay, you're just . . . open minded. If you were any more open minded, squirrels would build nests in your brain."

'Gay.' That new word. It sounded both old-fashioned yet hip, something light and casual you could be but it didn't have to end you. A few of his patients had been saying it for a while, but you knew a word had really come onto the scene when the AMA advised using it in discussion with patients, as "homosexual" sounded like something they'd get locked up for. A lofty goal when the APA still stuck them in the rubber room and shocked them 'til they passed for normal.

"Look, she'd be better off without me," Hawkeye was saying.

"What's eating you?" Trapper demanded, impatient with the self-pity.

"Nothing." Pierce's tone had a threatening edge on it.

Well, forget that. Trapper knew what he'd been playing at. He'd seen this Hawkeye before -- lonely and frustrated, conflicted and indecisive. The little touches, holding hands under the table, that speech before the party. Hawkeye was testing him, pulling him in and pushing him away just to see what he'd do. Hell, the entire invitation had come out of that Piercian inability to know what to do with his life, and Trapper had come because Hawkeye was Hawkeye, they were the kind of friends who had a really important, deep down bond. But if Trapper was going to get 'involved,' in any capacity -- and that was a big 'if' -- he wanted to know the score.

"Why'd you break up with Lena?" Trapper persisted.

Hawkeye turned away, looking into the night. Trapper didn't know when he'd taken Hawkeye by the arm, but he was filled with a sticky sense that if he let go, the hammock would tear in two and Hawkeye would drift away from him.

"We had a disagreement," Hawkeye said.

"Over what?"

"Over marigold wine. She thought a glass of wine with dinner was nice and I wanted to marry it and love it and make it our god."

In his smokey brain, it took Trapper a second to separate the wheat from the gobbledygook.

"Do you think you're an alcoholic?" he asked.

"No. Yes. Of course I am. That doesn't mean I'm not a groovy person, of course. It just means if I so much as look at a glass ever again, I'll irreparably destroy my kid forever." These weren't Hawkeye-words.

Trapper leaned in, resting his chin on Hawkeye's shoulder. "I'm sorry."

"She moved out." Hawkeye waved his arm in the air, and Trapper realized he was trying not to cry. "She said when I hadn't had a drink for a year, she'd come back. I guess I just reset that clock on that. Again. I should just leave them, find somewhere I can live alone."

"She's okay with the marijuana cigarettes?"

"Pot isn't addictive," he said.

"But --"

"The army lied, forget all those training videos," Hawkeye laughed, a harsh sound. "They let us drink ourselves into oblivion but they told us this stuff, which is practically harmless, would kill us dead if we tried it once."

Trapper stretched his arm across Hawkeye's chest and mingled their sneakers. Hawkeye's head came to rest against his cheek, his hand curling around Trapper's. They both knew what they were doing, and they both pretended -- under the cover of darkness, the brain haze of THC, the fragrance of summer -- that they didn't.

"Why can't you stop?" Trapper asked.

"I don't know," Hawkeye said miserably.

Hawk did know. Hawkeye was a man who ruminated, obsessed, dealt with, moved on. Trapper was discovering that this Hawkeye wasn't so different from his Hawkeye, Korea edition. He had a reason for everything he did. But if he didn't want to talk about it, Trapper didn't see a reason to press him.

Hawkeye leaned into the embrace, being the affectionate, social bear type that he was. He slipped his knee between Trapper's legs and lounged across him. Trapper ran his hand through Hawkeye's hair and rolled his ringers at the muscles at the base of his neck. Hawkeye nearly purred.

"Hawk," Trapper whispered.

"Hm? Don't stop."

Part of Trapper was annoyed that Hawkeye just couldn't get it together. It had been hard for all of them when they came home, rebuilding their regular practice, catching up on the newest techniques, having a family. People did it. Sure, Trapper's marriage had gone to pot but there was the sainted B.J. Hunnicutt; Radar and his wife had the farm, four kids, six dogs, three cats, two potbelly pigs, and a hutch of bunnies they raised for the angora fur (combed, not skinned). Why should Hawkeye have the luxury of being a basketcase when everyone else had to work so hard to be normal?

But Hawkeye was one of those unfortunate people who had a poor emotional immune system. He caught every feeling that was going around and it took him longer to get over them. Trapper remembered Hawkeye as wild, full of life, craving new experiences; but he did it all with a frantic energy, a need to fill up some deep lacking inside him. It was as if Hawkeye went around with his soul half-empty and needed a fill-up that only alcohol could provide. Trapper had never seen Hawkeye not use alcohol to numb that inner energy, so maybe it was a little unrealistic to expect him to kick the habit in peacetime.

And if it wasn't alcohol, it was sex.

"What're we doing?" Trapper said.

"What you came here for."

Trapper sighed. Had he really had any doubt what was going on this whole evening?

"Hawk, this won't solve anything."

Hawkeye moved in for some active snuggling. Hawkeye's nose and lips were ghosting along Trapper's throat, leaving soft whiffs of air, not quite kissing, just being there. Just enough not being there that Hawkeye could say he was asleep or dreaming or high if Trapper backed out.

He could back out. It had been a long, long time since he'd done anything like this. Twenty years since school, almost fifteen years since he and Hawkeye . . . well. Nothing happened, did it? But it could have. In another world, maybe it should have. But a kiss was just a kiss back then and Trapper's future had been a marriage to go home and destroy. Maybe this was making up time or maybe this was making more trouble. What the hell were the rules? Was there a counter culture commune etiquette book on love he should have consulted before he arrived? This was what Hawkeye had meant when he pulled him aside before the party, hadn't he? There were rules even in polyamory.

"Hawk," Trapper whispered. "I don't . . . Your life is already really complicated."

"Lena likes you," Hawkeye said.

Trapper searched Hawkeye's disingenuous expression for some explanation to that non sequitur. "Huh?"

"She read you right away," Hawkeye whispered into the sensitive skin below Trapper's ear. Trapper suppressed a shiver. "That conversation about dinner? You were chicken. Celibacy was beef."

Trapper looked up at Hawkeye just as Hawkeye looked down at him, his eyes denim in the dim light. A lightening bug blinked in Trapper's peripheral vision. Hawkeye leaned on Trapper's chest for better leverage. Despite the many, many good reasons telling Trapper to stop, the louder voice was saying that this felt really, really good. And he hadn't had the kind of sex where he cared about the other person's name in a long time.

Trapper would never admit this to anyone, not even Lena, much later when he understood how she could be his best friend: he kissed first. He had always said that on the Kinsey scale -- which Hawkeye was fond of quoting -- Hawkeye was farther to the sixes than Trapper was. But that wasn't true; or to make a point, it wasn't relevant, not when describing how two immovable bodies became in motion. The body with the greatest mass turned out to be the one carrying the greatest burden of loneliness. Hawkeye and Trapper kissed until they found their center of gravity, also known as their home.


	5. Chapter 5

Title: "Marigold Wine" part 5/?  
Pairing: Hawkeye/Trapper, Hawkeye/others  
Genre: Drama, romance, longfic, postseries, 60s  
Summary: In the 60s, Trapper visits his old army buddy at a hippie commune, where Hawkeye has retreated to find peace.  
Rating: R/M

Part 5

The hammock wobbled.

"Never kissed a mustache," Hawkeye muttered against Trapper's lips.

"Never?"

Kissing Hawkeye in the frame hammock at midnight in June was some kind of wonderful. Hawkeye didn't just hold still and wait to be made love to. He groped, he tickled. He wrestled. Trapper was using real muscles to grab Hawkeye's arms above his head while Hawkeye straddled his thighs and pinned him to the hammock. Hawkeye giggled, protesting the restriction of his arms, because above all he was a tactile octopus man. Without arms to grab, Hawkeye wrapped his legs around Trapper's waist, and being gripped by a longer, stronger pair than a woman's was a new sort of sensation. Not to mention that different feeling against his belly.

"Shh," Trapper whispered. "You're so loud."

"C'mon. Bed," Hawkeye said.

Trapper froze.

"What?" Hawkeye said.

"Nothin'." Trapper sat back, releasing Hawkeye.

Hawkeye sat up. "Trap, if this is your first time with a man --"

"No, not exactly --" Trapper looked down at his hands, fisting on his thighs.

"I'm not gonna expect anything more than you want --"

"I know."

"Look, just say the word." Hawkeye stood and held out his hand. "Whatever you're up for is okay with me."

Trapper looked up. "Really?"

Hawkeye beamed. "You lug," he teased. And Trapper was kissed all over.

In the bedroom, Trapper hardly had time to consider the huge, expectant expanse of Hawkeye's bed, for he was being kissed so insistently. Hawkeye had his shirt off with all those busy hands flying everywhere while Trapper toed off his shoes. As Hawkeye was busy pushing him onto the bed so he could sit in Trapper's lap and thumb his nipples, Trapper hesitantly slid his hands under Hawkeye's shirt.

Oh. Okay, that felt nice. Skin on skin. Just like with a woman except firmer, less curves. More surface area to explore. Sometime, Trapper wanted to get Hawkeye facedown on the bed and map each muscle in his back as they played interesting skipping games over one another. But not right now. He wanted to see as much of Hawkeye as he could as soon as possible. He pulled Hawk's shirt up over his head, mussing his dark hair, the silver glittering in the moonlight. Trapper smiled and ran his fingers through it, smoothing it down. He still kept it too long in front. Hawkeye kissed the palm of his hand.

"When did you decide to grow this?" Hawkeye ran his thumb over Trapper's mustache. Trapper kissed the digit.

"Year or two ago. Do you like it?"

Hawkeye smiled. "Makes you look . . . different."

Older, was the word Hawkeye was editing. Maybe that's why he liked it on himself. He got tired of people treating him like such a baby face.

"I'm not the same boy I was," Trapper whispered.

Hawkeye smoothed his hands down Trapper's chest, over his nipples, making Trapper shiver. He scooted back on the bed.

"You look just as good, to me," Hawkeye said.

Trapper smiled. That was good to hear, considered how damn resistable he'd felt since the divorce.

Hawkeye started at Trapper's throat, kissing his way thoroughly from one clavicle to the other, idly nipping an earlobe. His hands slid down Trapper's arms and spread his hands wide. Trapper, feeling useless but well taken care of, let himself be tended to. Hawkeye worked his way down the midline, his tongue doing very interesting swirly things. Ah, kissing his stomach -- Trapper loved that. It made his belly feel a pleasant sort of lurch. He hadn't bothered to make love to anyone that slowly for a long time, to bother with kissing stomachs; he and Hawkeye still had their pants on. Hawkeye worked his way east and nuzzled Trapper's exposed hipbone, a feeling that went straight to his groin. Trapper was ever so glad he'd worn his new low cut white hip-huggers, the ones with the two-inch zipper, that he'd seen in a South End shop.

He knew he looked good in those trousers, and Hawkeye didn't waste much time going for the front button. Hrm, perhaps buying them in super-hideous-tight hadn't been the best choice. Self conscious of the slightest of middle age spread down there (minimal, really, he'd tone up over the summer, he always did), Trapper sucked in and lent a hand with the button.

You couldn't wear underwear under those polyester trousers, even if you wanted to. Trapper wasn't some sort of gigolo, no-underwear-wearer, it was just the fashion. Hawkeye looked like he was unwrapping a present from Santa. Turning giddy, Hawkeye ran his palms over Trapper's thighs and stomach.

"Why, Trapper John."

"Don't start, you. That's how the pants are cut."

"Then let me take this opportunity to thank your pants from the top of my --"

"Get up here," Trapper said.

Grinning like a lecherous jack-o-lantern, Hawkeye came up for a kiss. As he kissed him, Trapper made quick work of Hawkeye's trousers and far less interesting underpants. Trapper pulled his naked friend on top of him and their bodies pressed together, skin to skin, all electrified over-sensation building between them as they kissed lazy, deep kisses. Hawkeye was making little noises in the back of his throat and wriggling ever so slightly. Every time he moved, their cocks rubbed gently between them. Trapper growled deep in his throat. A certain tension was building.

"What do you want to do?" Hawkeye muttered against his lips.

Trapper froze. "Um?"

Hawkeye hovered over him with a slight, teasing smile. "Okay, what _don't_ you want to do?"

Trapper still didn't have an answer, so he hid his utter confusion in Hawkeye's throat. His experience was with over the clothes stuff and seemed very childish compared to the speed that he was rounding the bases now. He didn't know what to ask for. He could extrapolate from the stuff one could do with a woman but was embarrassed to ask for anything women did for him; and then there were things he was curious about but didn't think he was the sort of person who did them; and finally there were things he was downright afraid to try.

"Trap," Hawkeye said, "if you don't say something, one of us is going to pounce and I'm not promising it'll be me."

Trapper laughed. "Are you so sure of your appeal?"

"Appealed to you so far, haven't I?" Hawkeye said with perfect egotism.

"I guess you've done it all, huh?"

Hawkeye shrugged. "I'm up for anything you are." His hand slid down Trapper's stomach, hovering just below the naval. "Like this?"

Trapper nodded, watching Hawkeye's eyes.

Hawkeye slid down his body. He kissed and nuzzled in the hollow of Trapper's hip.

"Lie back."

* * *

They lay in bed, kissing, as the rim of the world turned pink. In the purply-grey light, Hawkeye's eyes glittered wintery blue. Trapper breathed in deeply. A wreath of little green dusky leaves the size of his thumb hung over them and smelled like fresh soap. Trapper kissed his way down Hawkeye's throat, to his shoulder and back. Hawkeye smelled like patchouli and sweat. He could see, in the wan light, that Hawkeye's slight, early summer tan covered him all over with practically no tan lines.

"Did that hoist your petard?" Hawkeye said, utterly destroying the mood.

Trapper laughed and pressed his forehead against Hawkeye's chest.

"I don't know."

"Would you do it again?" Hawkeye said.

Trapper slid his knee between Hawkeye's legs.

"Yeah."

He kissed him because the groping and the kissing and the slide of skin on skin was much more pleasant than the talking. It would inflate Hawkeye's insufferable ego to admit he'd just received the most elegant blowjob of his life. Trapper only hoped he'd sufficiently reciprocated.

They dozed.

Hawkeye could sleep like the dead on any occasion, but once the stupid birds started chirping, Trapper could only float in a hazy, half-aware state. Was this foolish? He hardly knew where Hawkeye fit in his life anymore. Maybe that's why this felt so right; all the fun, none of the complications. Maybe in twenty-four hours this affection he felt would go away like the flu. He came here to get away from it all. Maybe he needed a break from women, too. Maybe he needed to explore himself, as Hawkeye seemed to be doing, and Louise said she needed to do by going to college and getting a job. How come when people went somewhere to find themselves, they had to do it far away from Trapper?

He didn't want to stultify Hawkeye like Louise said he did to her; he didn't want to suffocate anyone or cause a bad situation with Hawk and Lena. Whatever "agreement" they claimed to have, he personally knew what it felt like when your number one squeeze decided she liked someone else better. He could have handled Louise sleeping with Duke Squarejaw the dancing grad student, as long as Trapper could have carried on with every nurse at every conference who fell for his sensitive listening ear. But Louise broke the rules: you just don't fall in love with your temporary band-aids. That's not how the modern American affair is conducted.

He sort of understood this crazy love life Hawkeye was living. He could even understand why. If Hawkeye was polyamorous, did that mean Trapper would have to be if he wanted to be with Hawkeye? Did he want to _be with _Hawkeye? If he had to be truly honest, this wasn't the first time he wondered what it would be like to be in a relationship with Hawkeye, although this was the first time he didn't completely and utterly cock it up.

Trapper hadn't really thought about that day, about five miles from camp, when he and Hawkeye were driving back to the 4077th and their Jeep ran over a nail and someone had stolen the spare. And if that wasn't bad enough, soon the entire Chinese army decided to march past their position. For hours.

Trapper and Hawkeye ran from the road and found a boulder to hide behind. Meanwhile, the enemy idly rifled their Jeep for supplies, slashed the tires, and finally shot out the mirrors ("Now that's just low."). Hawkeye was in fine form that afternoon while they waited for the endless parade to pass.

"They pissed on our Jeep!" Hawkeye shrieked.

"Shh!" Trapper grabbed him by the scruff of the flak jacket and pulled him back behind the boulder. He peered over Hawk's head. "On it or in it?"

"What does it matter, they defaced our car. You know what that gets you in New York?"

Hawkeye climbed over Trapper for better view, kneeing him in the gizzard.

Trapper gasped, coughing. "Get down here, you're a perfect target with your head floating up over your body like that."

Hawkeye settled down, grumping with his back against the boulder. "What's the matter with you? You look like you're going into labor."

Trapper moaned. "Only if I'm passing a bouncing baby hernia."

Hawkeye stared. "Huh?"

Trapper pulled his shirt up, exposing his internal bleeding to the blessed, healing sunlight. "You booted me, right here." He probed his fingers in the divot between his third and fourth ribs.

"You're just projecting your pain to your internal organs," Hawkeye said. "You always loved that Jeep. We all did."

Trapper grunted.

Irritation turned to genuine concern. Hawkeye flitted his hand away. "Let me see."

Trapper moaned, too pained to resist. Hawkeye probed his ribs, but quickly figured out what Trapper didn't want him to: the pain in his belly.

"Tummy ache?" Hawkeye said.

"Comes and goes."

"You should stop drinking on an empty stomach," Hawkeye said.

Trapper squirmed under such scrutiny. Hawkeye still had his hand on his belly in the sunlight.

"I'm fine. It's just stress," Trapper said. "Y'know, someone walking by may get the wrong impression."

Hawkeye affected an implacable accent. "'I should think that if people were to get that impression of us, the one to which you so eloquently refer, it would not be a wrong impression in the slightest'."

Trapper blinked at him.

"Oscar Wilde," Hawkeye said.

"When you talk like that, you sound like you took a blow to the head."

Hawkeye delicately pulled Trapper's shirt back down. "Would you care to talk about your stress?"

"What's to talk about? I'm a million miles from clean showers and sidewalks and little girls and their dollies, and every other day someone either shoots at me or salutes. And I don't know which I find more offensive."

Hawkeye poked him in the arm, as he did to make a point sometimes. "You keep all that bottled up, it's going to put a hole in your belly."

"Let it," Trapper said.

"You don't mean that," Hawkeye said.

Trapper sighed. The Chinese were rat-a-ta-tatting a drum now. Badly. The poor rhythm was making him nauseous.

Hawkeye lounged against the boulder, wiggling his butt down into the dry grass. "It's a beautiful day, we're not ankle-deep in mud and blood, is it really so bad?"

Their Jeep blew up.

Trapper pulled Hawkeye down to the ground and they grabbed at each other.

"You caused that!" Trapper said. "That's your fault, that's fate saying not to screw around in a battle zone!"

"I did not!"

Trapper rolled over to look past the edge of the boulder, behind the cover of the scrubby bush beside it. Through the sticks, he could see the Chinese marching, now giving the smoldering Jeep wide berth.

Hawkeye leaned over him, bracing himself on Trapper's shoulder.

"It's okay," Trapper said. "It was those idiots shooting it up. They ignited the gas tank."

Hawkeye hauled off him, crossed his legs and leaned back against the boulder, comfortable as if he was at the beach. "I guess we'll be here a while."

"How long could a convoy be?" Trapper said.

Hawkeye rooted around in his pockets. He came up with two leathery lengths wrapped in paper. "I dunno. Jerky?"

Eight hours later, the stars were out, the Chinese were in, and Trapper was smacking bugs off all his exposed skin. They'd gone through the jerky, Trapper's flask, and were now sobering up to the reality that they'd have to get home somehow. It was looking to be the shoeleather express.

They stuck to the edge of the path as they walked so they could dive into the bushes if any Chinese soldier came by, someone too slow for the march but quick enough with his gun.

"'They say that spring means just one thing'," Hawkeye crooned, "to little lo-ove birds. Let's misbehave!'"

"Frank would say you've got a little birdie singing that on your shoulder on a long playing record," Trapper posited.

"I've got a woman with red horns on one shoulder, singing me naughty tunes, and a woman on the other shoulder telling me 'Listen to her'."

"Yeah? And what're they both saying right now?"

Hawkeye looked him over for a moment longer than Trapper felt entirely comfortable with.

"What?" Trapper said.

"Nothing. Just idle springtime imaginings."

Trapper grinned. "I know what you were thinking."

"No you don't. Never in a million years."

Trapper shook his head in amazement. "You went to boarding school, didn't you?"

Hawkeye glanced at him, all loose-jointed confidence. "Just for high school. Why? Having your own springtime daydreams?"

"It's nighttime."

"So call 'em night dreams."

Trapper brushed the stubble on his cheeks, considering. "What would you do right now if you knew you had a complete green light?"

Hawkeye's laugh was unnaturally high. "The fact that you're baiting me with a question like that means I do."

"I'm not saying anything. I'm not saying you do or you don't."

The gravel crunched under their feet. The camp was probably twenty minutes ahead. Hawkeye wasn't smiling anymore.

"Then how can I answer if the situation isn't real?" Hawkeye said. "We say we'd do all kinds of things when we know we can't really do them."

"I'm just saying, what happens on the road is road happenings. Not camp happenings," Trapper said.

Hawkeye stopped. Trapper paused, about to say something else, like nevermind, he was just fooling around. He had just meant they should go back to the Jeep and see if there was any alcohol in the spare tire well. Instead, he was yanked off his feet. With a grunt, he felt himself backed up against a tree. He was kissed.

His only regret was that it happened so fast, he hardly realized it was a kiss until Hawkeye was walking away from him. He kissed his Swampmate and practically missed it.

"What was that!" Trapper shouted, arms wide, taking in the whole of his confusion.

Hawkeye waved a hand. "A wild drive-by accostment. Happens all the time. There's all sorts of lip-bandits in these hills. How do you think Frank lost his?"

Trapper caught up to him, falling in stride. "You've been messing with me since I got here, you know that? People are talking."

Hawkeye glanced at him, eyes lidded. "So?"

"They don't say much, thanks to our progressive march through the nurses. But still. They're not the only one who's noticed you noticing me."

"You're crazy. Which one of us started this thing tonight?" Hawkeye's pace quickened. Trapper could see his hand picking at his shirt sleeve.

"Which one of us finished it?"

"I believe if it was finished, we would have ended this conversation ten minutes ago."

"Hawkeye." Trapper took him by the elbow. "Are you a homosexual?"

"Have you been bathing in the ether?" Hawkeye pulled away.

"Are you?"

Anger rolled off Hawkeye that was usually reserved for generals. "No!"

"Okay then."

"Are people saying that?" Hawkeye stuck his hands in his coat pockets.

Trapper shrugged. "Not after the punching starts. If you're not a homosexual, what was about that kissing?"

"There was no kissing."

"Excuse me, but --"

Hawkeye whirled, poking him in the ribs. "You know, I wasn't the one asking to be kissed." Trapper met his gaze, hard. Hawkeye scowled.

"Yeah?" Trapper said.

Hawkeye looked at his finger, buried in Trapper's muscled chest. "This is the kind of thing they talk about, isn't it?"

Trapper glanced around. They were almost at the little strip that included Rosie's Bar. Jeeps came by here all the time. He pulled Hawkeye off the road into a fruit stand that was boarded on three sides for the night.

Under cover of plywood, he said, "Yeah, there's the poking me in the chest all the time, the acting like you're a jealous wife, or someone's girlfriend, or a woman in general. You're more convincing than Klinger sometimes."

Hawkeye waved his hand in the air. "That's absurd. This place is so boring, I'm only fooling around to keep from going stark raving loony."

"That's what they mean, Hawk. Maybe you fool around like that because it's natural to you."

Hawkeye laughed, but his eyes were scared. Trapper suddenly felt guilty. What did he plan to get out of this?

"I'm sorry." Trapper touched Hawkeye's arm. Hawkeye glanced down at the hand. Trapper dropped it. "Look, I don't _care_ when you pretend to flirt with me, I know it's a gas --"

"Then why are you bringing this up? Huh? What's the point here, Trapper John?"

Trapper paused. "I don't know. I'm sorry. I just thought you should know what people are saying."

"Thanks," Hawkeye said. "You know that's always utmost in my mind."

Trapper touched his arm again. "Not too many people say it, just idiots like the guys in the motor pool and, well, Frank, but he thinks 'communist' and 'deviant' are the same thing as 'foreigner.' No one is out to get you or anything."

"I'm not after you," Hawkeye said.

"I know, buddy."

"Or anyone else, except Nurse Charlie."

Nurse Charlie was married and had her hands full with Ugly John, but Trapper didn't say that he knew that, or knew that he knew Hawkeye knew that. Meanwhile, Hawkeye had backed himself into the corner of the stand. Well, hell. Trapper hadn't meant this to get so _serious._ Rumors went around like this all the time, people just laughed it hadn't thought about the answer before he'd asked the question, or maybe he had, he just hadn't thought how the answer would affect anyone other than himself.

Feeling like a heel, Trapper took him by the elbow. "C'mon. There's a gallon of nurses waiting for us, Romeo."

This happened two weeks before the drag bar in Tokyo, a few months before leaving Hawkeye without a note because what he wanted to say he couldn't put down on paper, where someone could find it, and anything else sounded insipid. As they strode into camp that night, it occurred to Trapper that a guy like Hawkeye had a lot of evidence to back up his claim that he wasn't a homosexual, nursing shifts A through C being his first line of defense. So why hadn't he fought harder?

It was the first time Trapper considered that to some guys, sex was like a martini. And while most like it all gin, and a few only wanted vermouth, a couple of guys mixed up their own recipe along a continuum of sweet to dry.


	6. Chapter 6

Title: "Marigold Wine" part 6/?  
Author: lj user="Aura218"  
Pairing: Hawkeye/Trapper, Hawkeye/others  
Genre: Drama, romance, longfic, postseries, 60s  
Summary: In the 60s, Trapper visits his old army buddy at a hippie commune, where Hawkeye has retreated to find peace.  
Rating: R/M

Part 6

Trapper awoke to an airraid. No, a sniper. . . . Construction? A jaunty bell chime cut through the clear morning.

Oh, God: Typewriter.

Sky-cracking clacking. Manual typewriter.

Hawkeye cursed.

Manual without a correction ribbon.

Trapper slapped around for his watch, but there was no end table and no water-resistant Swiss watch with flex-o-twist band. Because he was in Hawkeye's bedroom, and Hawkeye's bed, and his watch was still on his wrist, which meant he'd slept on it and the newfangled band took out quite a few arm hairs when he turned it around to read it. Nine twenty-nine A.M. Later than he usually got up, but he didn't often stay up until dawn with his new lover.

Huh, he thought. I have a new lover. Even when he had a new affair, he didn't think of any of those girls as _his lover_. Outside of the plotting stage, he rarely thought about them at all.

Trapper pulled back the curtain and stepped into the living room, or whatever Hawkeye was calling it. Hawk was scowling at a typewriter as he delicately rolled a typewriter eraser over the sheet still rolled into it.

"Hey," Trapper grunted in his pre-coffee voice.

Hawkeye turned and took him in - naked, sleepy, and grouchy. A grin broke across Hawkeye's face like the dawn.

"Morning," he said.

"Where's the head?"

Hawkeye pointed out the kitchen window. "Take a right out the back door, go about a twenty-five yards into the woods, it's the shack with the hole under it. Or there's the bushes near the stream."

Trapper grunted.

"Showers are the other direction," Hawkeye continued cheerfully, "but we're going to the lake later, so I'm taking a mountain man shower."

"What's that?"

Hawkeye bushed the eraser bits out of his typewriter. "You're clean if you swam today. I have water on the fire for a shave and a tooth brush. You missed breakfast, but I saved you some toast and coffee."

"Oo."

Trapper scrambled for pants, grabbing Hawkeye's because they were easier to get back into, and chucked his toiletries bag on the sofa. Out back of the cabin ran a sliding rocky path that led to the stream. Trapper picked the bushes and high-stepped it barefoot back to the cabin. He felt ten years old again, if he'd ever gone to camp; he felt like the ten-year-old Hawkeye must have been in that little town in Maine.

"Doesn't this place get restrictive?" Trapper said when he came in. "Group meals, no indoor plumbing, that sort of thing."

Hawkeye shrugged over his monstrous black typewriter. "You get used to it. We're supposed to be enjoying the simplicity of using only what we need."

"How's that going?" Trapper pulled on clean clothes in the living room while Hawkeye pretended not to watch. Trapper pretended not to flex.

"Every society has rules," Hawkeye said. "Here, you can swim naked or show up to lunch in a feather boa and call it art. There's always trade-offs. We can't tap into the city's power grid too much or they'll tax us."

Trapper chuckled.

He took the toast and coffee from Hawkeye's all-purpose table and settled in front of the fire. He stirred the coals to life and set the dishes on the hearth to warm. Hawkeye said he built up a fire every morning for hot water and breakfast, even in the summer, because it was cool in the mountains in the cabins. It would be warmer later, and then comfortable to sleep.

"What're you writing?" Trapper re-toasted his toast with a long fork.

"This and that," Hawkeye said, leaning over his papers with a pencil. Trapper noticed that he wore rectangular rimless wire reading glasses now. Looked cute. "I felt inspired."

Trapper eyed him over his coffee mug. "By me?"

Hawkeye smirked. "One might say."

Trapper crunched down on the toast. Mmm - homemade brown bread. Like the stuff they gave you in school during the Depression.

"Just don't name any names," Trapper said.

Hawkeye smiled like an angel fairly skipping softly downward.

* * *

By "we" are going to the lake, Hawkeye had meant they were meeting the whole clan - Lena, the kids, Siva. Trapper looked for a pair of swim trunks least likely to be blazoned with a scarlet A. He wondered what the etiquette was for lunching with the woman who'd given her husband permission to take him to bed the night before. Maybe Hallmark did a special type of engraving for that.

Trapper and Hawkeye found Lena on the porch of the women's cabin, a huge, converted barn. The whole front of the barn was hung with a jungle of blooming vines and bushes; every window was dressed with shades, and a wreath hung on the door. Girls lived here. Above the lintel, someone had painted a terrifying nude crone figure who crouched over the door and stared down at them in a way that made Trapper's danglies recede.

"Is she wearing baggy bloomers?" Trapper subtly indicated the crone.

"No," Hawkeye said.

Trapper made the sign of the cross. He hitched himself onto the porch railing while Hawkeye rescued Sunny from the basket he was making a valiant escape from, thoroughly ignoring his mother's attempt to contain him. Trapper smiled as he watched Hawkeye bounce the kid on his knee.

Lena was responsible for the macramé plant holders above his head, Trapper discovered, as well as the afghan he'd slept under yesterday afternoon. As he and Hawkeye sat on the porch waiting for Siva, he watched her hand twirl a tiny hook and tease an endless stream of mustard yarn into a tiny circle.

"Miss Lily in the dairy is turning eleven," Lena said. "I'm making about fifty of these to crochet together into a vest. The girls have decided they're a trend."

"Is she one of your students?" Trapper played with Sunny while Hawkeye held him, letting Sunny hold his hand and pretending it was a grip of death. Babies liked to think they could hurt you.

"One of my best," Lena said from her ramrod perch on the porch swing. "I'm also her spiritual guidepost."

"Uh huh," Trapper said. Why couldn't they just say 'godmother'? Was that really so establishment? Who had a thing against Cinderella?

Inside, some women and girls were giggling and doing some women-and-girls thing. Maybe a spell celebrating their menstrual cycles. Trapper didn't dare ask. If there was any spirituality in this house at all, it was female to the core, and it was suspicious of him. He edged a little closer to Hawkeye.

"And what did you boys do this morning?" Lena asked.

Trapper almost fell into the bushes. Well, ma'am, I snuck up on this fella doing the dishes and gave him my first reach-around handjob. Then I almost lost it when he got down on his knees in front of me and hung onto my belt like an acrobat. Shortly thereafter, we boiled some more wash water. If it hadn't been for you, we'd have done it all over again twice.

"Dunno about Harpo here, but I penned a masterpiece," Hawkeye said.

"Don't get carried away, dearest," Lena said.

Hawkeye put on a wounded air. "I feel defamed."

Lena looked up from her stitchery as if Hawkeye were tearing her from a task far more important than his existence, his town, his country, his planet.

"Dear heart," she said, "after each first draft you lift yourself to the heights of expectation, only to fall to the depths of despair when you must rework the piece in editing. It isn't good for you, or your work. As I tell my students, writing is editing."

"She does say that," Hawkeye said. "She makes them write it at the top of all their compositions."

"I should do the same to you," Lena said, eyeing them over her work. "You're making a bad schoolteacher of me."

"Never." Hawkeye shoved off the railing and kissed the part of her hair.

Trapper looked away. Up the road, from the other direction than the courtyard, Siva was coming. Jeremiah trailed behind, thumping along the homemade fishing poles. His dad took them before he broke the handles.

"Boys are here!" Hawkeye crowed and met them in the front yard. Jeremiah ran ahead. And grabbed his . . . uncle? around the waist.

"Hi, Hawkeye!"

Trapper watched Hawkeye's face and his opinion was sealed. Hawkeye loved this kid like his own.

Siva greeted Lena on the porch with a kiss.

"Hello again," Siva said to Trapper.

Trapper reached out to shake hands, but was given a basket instead. He stumbled, surprised by the weight.

"Careful, there's glass in there," Siva said helpfully.

"Right."

Lena shot him a hard look, but gave Trapper a bright smile. "Are we ready?"

Hawkeye had the baby on one hip and Jeremiah's hand on his other side. "Ready when you are."

As with all family vacations, the calm lasted about five minutes. Siva chased after Jeremiah, who pulled away from Hawkeye to show them all a particular spot by the lake. The baby howled for something. Lena took him from Hawkeye, saying she'd hurry ahead with Jeremiah so she could nurse the baby sooner. Hawkeye and Trapper, not quite as bushytailed, fell behind.

"They sure picked a gorgeous spot here," Trapper said.

Hawkeye nodded. "It'll die down in winter, you'll be able to see clear through to the highway in some places. Loses a bit of its magic. But it's sure something to behold in summertime."

Trapper hmm'd. "I can't believe you're starting at the beginning at your age. With a younger woman, no less."

Hawkeye smiled. "'You're only as young as you feel'? Lena's not that much younger than me, she's just perfectly preserved. Not like me, I'm falling apart."

Trapper smiled. Quietly, "Look put together to me."

Hawkeye glanced around them. He took Trapper by the hand and pulled him closer, slipping his arm around his waist. As they bopped down the bumpy path, Trapper's hand landed on the back of Hawkeye's neck, tangling in the longish hair.

Kicked up dust rose in the sunshine. Birds chirped high in the trees, swooped down to peck at an insect, flew off into the low branches.

"I just realized," Hawkeye said. "You haven't held the baby yet. People like to do that, you know. It's like a ride. Come up here, buy a ticket, hold the baby."

Someone was coming up the path. They decoupled and put some light between them.

"I don't need to hold any babies," Trapper said when the opposite group passed.

Hawkeye glanced at him. Trapper avoided his eye.

"Who?" Hawkeye said.

Trapper shook his head. "Becky."

"Yeah?"

"She ran off with some guy. She sent us a picture postcard from Washington state saying she was fine and not to contact her, except would we please send her fifty dollars for rent money."

Hawkeye's judgmental eyes were on him. "Yeah yeah?"

Trapper shoved his hands in his pockets. "Not gonna let my oldest daughter live on the street. I didn't tell Louise."

"What about the boyfriend, or expectant father?"

"That meatball?" Trapper said.

"If that's what we're calling him."

"The word from Louise's private investigator is that he's in prison. And there's no baby."

Hawkeye glanced at him, eyes wide. He looked straight ahead. "What's that mean?"

Trapper sighed, deep in his throat. "Becky said she was pregnant, Louise said she found folic acid in Becky's purse. I don't know what to believe with that girl anymore, hence the P.I. According to his investigation, 'it is extremely unlikely there is a baby present in Miss McIntyre's life.'"

"If you didn't sort of believe this," Hawkeye said, "you wouldn't be so upset. So you think either she had the baby . . ."

Trapper shook his head. "The way I see it, either she lied, which is a pretty extreme way for a twenty-year-old to get permission to run away from home, or she was pregnant and she put it up for adoption. Or."

"Or?"

Trapper scuffed his sneakers, kicking up stones. "Well. We don't know why the meatball is in prison."

Hawkeye looked nauseous. "I refuse to entertain that idea."

"You think that doesn't happen? To nice girls from nice homes?"

"I know it happens." Hawkeye looked at the dirt path, hands in his pockets.

"Hawk . . . she's not my little girl anymore. She's all grown up and making her own stupid mistakes. There's nothing I can do for her. She doesn't want to deal with me, then okay. I don't deal with her."

Hawkeye glanced at him. "So . . . what? This one's done, on to the next kid?"

Trapper could feel Hawkeye staring at him as they headed single file up the steep woods path, precluding conversation. Hawkeye wouldn't understand, his kid was tiny and perfect and needed him. It was different when they learned to talk and drive. He hardly even knew Becky anymore, so how sorry could he feel for losing a stranger?

* * *

Up ahead, Lena hefted Sunny higher on her chest as she followed Jeremiah up the hill to the docks. Sunny was sucking on her neck. I'm the most celibate woman on the camp, she thought, and the love of my life is giving me a hickey.

Behind her, she could hear her husband and Trapper talking quietly. She sensed they wanted privacy, so she touched Siva on the arm to bid him to match her swift pace.

Siva said, "And how was your night?"

Her night. Where to begin telling your best friend how you felt about setting up your suspended husband with his best friend. . . .

"I slept very well."

He glanced down at her. She ducked her head, hiding her smile.

"C'mon now, honey. You're telling me you're really okay with those two?"

Lena sighed and took Siva's arm. He bent it courteously, lacing their fingers.

"He needs a friend," she finally said.

"He's got friends."

Lena shook her head. "He needs more than a friend. And I need a partner in Hawkeye-wrangling. And since you -"

"Don't start," Siva said, not unkindly.

"I know, I'm not asking you to take him on again."

Siva kicked a spiny walnut pod. It spun into the bushes. "Take him on a long ride into the wilds, maybe."

"Don't be ridiculous, dear heart, no one gets lost in the American woods any longer, especially not in Maine."

"We'll see."

They crunched to the apex of the hill, where the dirt and grass ended and the rocky beach sloped down to the shore. Closer to the water, the broken rocks sealed to wide, flat, boulders excellent for sunning and picnicking. Jeremiah was sitting cross-legged on one with the fishing poles clenched between his knees while he carefully unstuck the hooks and unwrapped the lines.

"Your feelings are valid," she said. "He needs too much. He needs a wife and a brother and maybe also a - a husband, if you grasp it. Hawkeye is a man with too much hurt for one person. I think this Trapper understands that."

"What about Trapper? Does he know you're yentaing up everyone's future?"

Lena looked down the hill where two heads, one tawny, the other dark, bobbed up the path apace. "I didn't ask him to bring Trapper here, in fact I think Trapper invited himself. And I didn't ask Trapper into his bed last night. I think Trapper came here for reasons of his own."

"How do you know Trapper is interested in that kind of relationship?"

Lena smiled. "I think Trapper is as Hawkeye is. What are you?"

Siva took the excuse of his son to avoid answering. He tossed a glance over his shoulder. Hawkeye and the new guy spotted Rosie and some of the girls from the printing press coming up the hill; the two guys sprang apart like shrapnel.

"You ever notice how this place draws all the shattered people?" Siva said.


	7. Chapter 7

Title: "Marigold Wine" part 7/?  
Pairing: Hawkeye/Trapper, Hawkeye/others  
Genre: Drama, romance, longfic, postseries, 60s  
Summary: In the 60s, Trapper visits his old army buddy at a hippie commune, where Hawkeye has retreated to find peace.  
Rating: R/M

Part 7

When Lena assigns us essays for school, she says we need an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. So here is how to write an essay on fishing:

My name is Jeremiah and sometimes I like fishing and sometimes I do not. There are three reasons for each of my feelings.

I like fishing when I catch something. I like fishing when Daddy and Hawkeye fish with me. I like fishing when there are lots of other people to fish with. I do not like fishing when it is hot. I do not like fishing when I don't catch something. I do not like fishing when the other people I go with yell at each other.

In conclusion, fishing is an important part of our commune because it gives us food without hurting the earth except for the fish but that's okay because God says all animals are supposed to eat each other and we are animals too.

This is a very good essay because it is more than a hundred words.

* * *

Lena was proving to be a supportive but practical woman. The goal of the afternoon was to catch lunch, so naturally she brought three kinds of salad and a basket of bread and fruit. Trapper helped her secure the salads in the cool lake while the more sportsmanlike men started to catch the protein.

The lake was gorgeous. Carved by a glacier and enclosed on its eastern side with mountains, their spot was shady in the morning but warm as lunchtime approached. The water moved swiftly over the calico bed, and Trapper could feel little sunfish nipping at his toes as he sat on the wide, flat, warm boulders that served as a perfect fisherman's wharf. Jeremiah had high hopes for more than sunnies, which even Trapper considered bait; Hawkeye told jack tales of actual trout or even early salmon.

No one wore shirts at the lake, even Lena, which caused Trapper to mentally recite "sophisticated, grownup, those things are for feeding Sunny" over and over until he could look Lena in the eye without so much as a leer. Bisexuality was becoming less of a fuzzy theory and more like tangible reality, as his hormones were torn between Lena tanning tits-up on the rock and Hawkeye's fingertips sneaking teasing caresses on his hands, spine, neck, thighs . . .

Coastal men by birth, Trapper and Hawkeye took a natural lead in all things ichthyoid. The poles were handmade but strong yew. Jeremiah had dug up the most promising bait that morning.

Jeremiah, perched on Siva's lap, tolerantly let his father help him hold "his" pole. "The fat yellow worms that live under rocks are good for trout," he was saying. "But so are cricket worms."

"Cricket larvae," Siva corrected.

"You did a good job, kiddo," Trapper said.

"I'm the best worm digger because I have a secret worm place that no one knows about. What to know where it is?" Jeremiah peered up at Trapper and nearly dropped his pole. Siva grabbed it.

"How do you know you can trust me?" Trapper said.

Jeremiah pondered that. "Nevermind."

Hawkeye howled. "You see? He's a genius. You are a gossip fiend."

Jeremiah grinned.

"That's my boy," Siva said.

By two, they hadn't caught catch any fish, and while conversation hadn't lagged, the kids and Trapper were whining. Lena declared lunchtime - otherwise the salad dressings would turn, and anyway Sunny wanted feeding and if she was nursing, she was eating.

After lunch, the crickets buzzed a low drone as the afternoon sun shone straight across the bright lake water. To really cement that fishing was a done deal, Siva and Jeremiah scared all the fish away with twin rolling cannonballs. The boys shrieked and whooped, calling Lena in. With a put-upon sigh, Lena followed them delicately into the lake.

Someone had to watch the baby. In the shade, Hawkeye stretched out in the grass, head in Trapper's lap, Sunny tucked up against his hip. Hawkeye lined up a few river stones and gave them names and sound effects. They had personalities and political aspirations. There was an acorn interloper named Flagg from Russia.

"That's quite an accent on the lady double agent," Trapper observed.

"All pinecones are double agents," Hawkeye said. "They get more obvious the longer they stick around."

"How come you never went into pediatrics?" Trapper poured himself a cup of lemonade from the thermos. "You used to say 'There's gold in them thar diapers'."

Hawkeye's cars fell silent, except the clacking as Sunny ran them into each other (the best part of playing Cars.)

"I just lost the interest," Hawkeye said.

"You love kids."

Hawkeye shook his head against Trapper's thigh. "I love _my_ kids. Kid. Sunny's mine, I can control what happens to him. And believe me, it took me almost ten years to get to that point of acceptance of my uselessness in regards to the greater disasters in the world. I couldn't deal with an endless parade of sick and hurt kids, knowing that some of them wouldn't get better and there was nothing I could do about it."

Hawkeye was getting awfully hot about it. Sure, there were a lot of civilian wounded in Korea, that would probably mess with anyone's head.

Trapper scritched the back of Hawkeye's neck. "Sorry I asked."

* * *

Out in the lake, the ripples were gold in the sunlight and Lena could see clear to the bottom. The mountain water was _cold_ but glorious to play in, just like the spring in the little English town she grew up in. The air was probably around eighty-eight by now, even though it had started closer to sixty-five this morning. It never got this hot in England. She hoped Hawkeye remembered to keep Sunny's hat on, even though he said it looked stupid.

With a roar, Siva leaped out of the water, Jeremiah lofted high above him. The boy seemed to know just how to move his body to fly incredibly far when his daddy threw him. He landed with a graceful splash.

"That always looks like such fun," Lena said.

"You want a go?" Siva said, coming at her.

"No!" she cried.

"Get Lena!" was the last thing Lena heard before Siva had her in his arms. They plunged into the cold lake. Well, honestly. Now she'd have to do her hair.

She came up sputtering for good effect, to make Jeremiah laugh at her. Siva held on, pulling her close.

"That was horrid," she said.

Jeremiah swam to her side. He hugged her around the hips, feet kicking behind him. "You were funny, Lena."

She hitched up the cotton shorts she wore to swim in. "Thank you, dear heart."

"I could warm you up," Siva whispered against her neck. His arms were warm underneath her bare breasts.

She uncircled herself from both sets of arms and sent Jeremiah paddling away.

"Don't do that in front of him," she said to the bigger, less simple problem in her life. "You'll confuse him."

"Sweetheart, he was drinking last night," Siva said.

"Jeremiah was?"

Siva made an irritated noise. "When are you going to give up on Hawkeye?"

* * *

"Was the bonnet a gift?" Trapper said.

"My Aunt Bitsy," Hawkeye said. "It's practically Victorian, isn't it?"

Sunny looked like some sort of foundling. He lay in the grass on a receiving blanket made of two old shirts sewn together, wearing a cloth diaper and an enormous, lacy, cream sunbonnet.

"I don't know why Lena insists on covering his head but not the rest of him." Hawkeye's broad, tan hand covered his son's belly. The kid giggled and grabbed it.

The heat really got into your bones, made thinking or moving just too much work. Hawkeye lay on his side beside the baby, half lounging on Trapper, who was barely holding his sleepy head up on Lena's big woven bag stuffed with blankets and extra clothes. Hawkeye traced the soft hills of Sunny's chubby arms and legs, fingers and toes, while Trapper absently rubbed Hawkeye's bare back. The wind high in the trees stilled as the temperature climbed, bees hummed in the blueberry bushes at the wood's edge, and an occasional splash or giggle rose up from the lake. Behind them toward the camp someone was playing a guitar. What if all of Boston shut down like this at two p.m. and took a siesta? What if the whole world got into a hammock or a day bed with their wives and babies and just breathed each other?

Trapper leaned over and kissed Hawkeye, upside-down.

"What was that for?"

"Serenity looks good on you," Trapper said.

Hawkeye smiled. "He sort of looks like me, doesn't he?"

"Sure he does."

"And not only the hair?"

"'Corse not. There's the eyes. And the unfortunate nose."

Hawkeye poked Trapper in the belly, gently. "His nose is perfect. He's perfect. Now if only I don't break him."

"You won't." Trapper massaged Hawkeye's neck reassuringly.

"Or let anything else break him."

"It won't."

"You don't know that," Hawkeye said, fear and wonder in his voice.

Trapper fell silent. He worked his hand into Hawkeye's hair, rubbing the base of his skull, the way Louise sometimes had done for him after a long day. Hawkeye looped one long arm across Trapper's middle and snuggled into his stomach. The man really did crave affection, or at least the reassurance of another person liking him back. Trapper put one arm behind his head and let all the tension melt out of body.

* * *

Lena bobbed in the water, looking anxiously back at the rocky bank.

"Do you really think he'll stop drinking?" Siva said.

Lena turned. "Not today, please."

"When? Lena -"

"I don't know, Siva!" Lena stood full height in the water, so it milled around her waist. Siva looked up at her, for once. "How about after a party, or when I'm on my way to school, or in the middle of dinner, or two seconds after you met him, or when you were breaking up with him, or any of the five hundred other times you tell _me_ what your problem is with Hawkeye instead of telling him?"

Siva was looking over her shoulder. Lena turned. Jeremiah was treading water behind her, watching them both with saucer eyes.

Lena gave Siva a Look and dove under the water.

* * *

Hawkeye wasn't really asleep. Trapper was whuffling and making the hairs on his goofy mustache wiggle. Sunny still made his newborn noises as he slept, little snorty gasping that sometimes scared the hell out of Hawkeye if he listened too closely. Sometimes Hawkeye turned the baby on his side, just in case.

Was he an overprotective father? Yeah, maybe, if only to make up for his days of utter neglect. A baby was fragile, an disaster took seconds, and for a year he was more interested in a bottle of homemade wine than his own kid. When he came back to himself, Hawkeye wanted to make it up with as much quality time as he could. Sunny amazed him, every new skill he learned, every sound, even the new way his hair grew or when he learned to say his favorite word (currently: "no").

Hawkeye had screwed up, big. He knew that. He'd apologized fifteen times. But apologies were easy. Laying off the booze was hard. Personally, he didn't think he should be expected to abstain one hundred percent for the rest of his life. What that normal? Just because he spent long periods of time dealing with boredom or life change by cowardly drinking away his feelings. Just because he was checked out for six months of his kid's short life by being drunk or unconscious all the time. Just because he spent months getting close to Jeremiah only to check out on him, too, and was only now making it up to him. He used to do things with the kid, take him fishing or hang around in Lena's classroom. Just be there for him, fill the hole his mother left when she went AWOL. Jeremiah didn't run to Hawkeye as quickly as he used to, he asked his father for things instead of Hawkeye. Hawkeye wasn't his favorite person anymore. Well, maybe that was how it should be.

Hawkeye knew he hadn't always been this dependant, this unable to exist in the real world. He drank a lot in college and in the service. Was this the man he'd grown into? He didn't have to be so . . . afraid of things. Afraid of disaster. He knew he had a real self to get back to. He saw that self in the memories Trapper had of him.

If Trapper would have him, Hawkeye truly didn't believe that Trapper and Lena posed a conflict between one another. He used to have a hang up about that, that he had to date sequentially, one woman at a time. Back in the war, he thought had to only date women and had a big guilt hang up about being attracted to Trapper and, well, maybe there had been other men he'd admired a bit more than society dictated. Ten years, Lena, a lot of books, some experimentation. When they'd first arrived at the commune and fallen in with Siva, well, that had been more than a mistake, he'd been a disaster; the philosophy that 'fall in love with the person, not the age' had been well enough when Siva had developed a crush on him. Hawkeye hadn't reciprocated at first, not really. It had been an ideal to strive for, to see if the three of them really could be a family.

Well. Perhaps he and Siva were more like competitive cousins than spouses. Hawkeye didn't like what had happened with Siva. Suddenly he started pulling away from both of them, intimating that race had something to do with his sudden disinterest in Hawkeye romantically, which baffled Hawkeye, who never thought of Siva or Jeremiah as Black other than in the bare factual way. But now his piecemeal family was in limbo. Hawkeye still loved Lena and she said she loved him. Sunny and Jeremiah needed parents, and Hawkeye suddenly found himself in love with his oldest friend.

In love with? Hawkeye hadn't meant to think that. Trapper surely wasn't in love with him. Except for that time Hawkeye caught him at the Go table with a muscular geisha on his lap, kissing "her" neck and getting hands-y. . . . And, okay, that time on the road back to camp that was a collision outside time and space, but all other evidence suggested Trapper was straight. Straight men might on occasion sleep with other men, but fall in love? Statistically, Dr. Kinsey may have found one or two, but what's the likelihood that Trapper was that one guy?

But since when did Hawkeye want more than a shack-up? Since when did he think about the future? That wasn't his M.O. Since he had Sunny, that's when. Trapper would be a good influence on Hawkeye, keep him steady. Keep him sober.

Was his interest in Trapper self-serving, then? Was that why he wrote his friend for the first time in years and invited him to the commune? Hawkeye felt a little embarrassed now, seeing it from Trapper's perspective, how out of the blue it must have seemed. They hadn't seen each other since the reunion almost ten years ago. What kind of claim had Hawkeye thought he'd had on Trapper's time and emotions, not to mention his love life? He could be honest with himself now: he had designs on Trapper when he invited him to come to the commune. Being accused and convicted as an alcoholic had put Hawkeye in a nostalgic frame of mind, making him second guess everything he'd ever done. Everything he didn't do.

Why had he avoided Trapper at medical conferences for years, but not B.J.? Because Trapper was a possibility, Hawkeye realized now, and it didn't matter that B.J. was married too because with B.J. there was no way. Hawkeye had been afraid of confronting that part of himself and of showing it to someone he really trusted, someone who he knew he couldn't hide his 'gay' side from, or whatever he should be calling it. Someone who had seen it once before and almost brought it out.

So Hawkeye could thank Siva for one thing. The man had had a crush on him and Hawkeye knew about it and even reciprocated for a while and he hadn't died. It had made him a better man. It hadn't invalidated all his jauntings with women, either. It took a little fearful part of him away and replaced it with someone he liked a lot better.

* * *

Siva swam backwards, away from Lena, pulling Jeremiah in front of him. If he ever had to leave this place, everything that mattered to him was right here, right now. He could probably convince Lena to leave that drunk she called a husband and they could be a normal family.

Siva didn't hate Hawkeye. That would be wasting energy. Can you get angry at a hurricane? He knew from his mother there was no use fighting someone else's addiction. You just had to get out of its path before it destroyed everything you loved.

Of all the guys to ruin himself over. Too much pot, too much open-mindedness, too much letting go of his hang-ups. Some hang-ups were useful, appropriate. Siva wasn't gay. Hawkeye was a big disaster that came into his life and he was going to be a man and get Lena out of it.

If only women knew when to cut and run instead of committing to a lost cause.

* * *

Trapper reached over Hawkeye's waist and took Sunny's hand. Sunny wrapped his fist around it and grinned. Hawkeye watched Trapper watching the kid.

"Thought you were tired of babies," Hawkeye said.

"He's cute."

Trapper made a face. Sunny made an O with his lips, fascinated.

"He likes you," Hawkeye said.

"You didn't tell me why you and Lena decided to come here," Trapper said.

Hawkeye paused, wondering how much to tell.

"It wasn't a great romance. We were in Hartford, she was teaching English to the underprivileged. I was schmoozing my way into the chief surgeon position at a trauma center that was better funded than God. And I was bored. Miserable. But I hid it well, at least until I tricked her into moving in with me."

Trapper propped his chin on Hawkeye's shoulder and listened.

He'd been in bad shape before they came to the commune. There was something broken in both of them, obviously, or she wouldn't have put up with him as long as she did.

So at around seven one evening, Hawkeye was in the bedroom while Lena cleaned up dinner and listened to the radio in the front room. He was outlining his novel on a legal pad. Actually, he was supposed to be working on his charts, but he had pulled out the legal pad to write down an addendum to a chapter. Across the header, he'd written: "M*A*S*H 4077th: Best Ca" except the 'a' was now a blot. He flipped the pages - he'd impressed that 'a' through a centimeter of paper.

"Shouldn't use a fountain pen for notes," he muttered.

By ten o'clock, he'd be drunk, the charts wouldn't be finished, the legal pad would be filled with junk, and he'd have spent the whole evening ignoring his girl. He could see the whole evening stretched out before him, and hated it. He'd prefer to be at work, but they kicked him out after twelve hours a day. Twelve hours felt like nothing after Korea. How he wished for physical work, real exertion, that turned his muscles to noodles and shut off his mind.

Disgusted, Hawkeye kicked his legs off the bed and launched himself out of the room. He needed air. He needed to drive into the city, find a decent martini, music, people. He needed to find a woman to temp him and give him a big, difficult decision to mull over all night. Maybe he'd attract a fistfight, or at least a citation for public drunkenness.

Lena looked up, startled, when he stormed out of the bedroom.

"How's the book coming?" she said.

"What? Fine," Hawkeye said from inside the coat closet.

"You haven't shown me a chapter in a few weeks."

Hawkeye looked at her in the mirror inside the door. She was barefoot, blonde, in a low scooped dress with no hose on her legs. If he saw her across a martini bar, he'd be making his way over to her already. But then, in a martini bar she wouldn't be looking at him with such suspicion and disappointment.

"Not tonight," Hawkeye said. "I've, ah, got plans."

"Which are?"

Hawkeye looked down at his hands, flexed them in his leather gloves. He didn't want to lie to her, though a smooth one formed on his tongue and just begged to slip out. He could make her trust his untrustworthy side, if he wanted to be that guy to her, that mischievous, immature Cpt. Pierce.

"Sweetheart," she said. His heart hurt.

"I'll be home ear - "

The phone rang.

Hawkeye lunged to answer it, ignoring Lena's eyes on him.

"Dr. Pierce, please?"

Hawkeye winced. His secretary. He wasn't on call tonight, she should be calling Dr. Wycoff, and he told her so. She said Mrs. Travers was complaining of a stomach ache again and said that Dr. Wycoff said to take an aspirin and just show up for her usual appointment.

Hawkeye leaned against the wall. "Look, Wycoff knows what he's doing. If that's his orders, then she should follow them."

"I'll pass that on, Doctor, if you're sure."

"Of course I'm sure." Hawkeye hung up.

He drove into Hartford and found a piano bar, ordered a string of martinis and found another veteran to talk to all night. He slept it off on the sofa in his office rather than drive home blitzed, which was why he got the news bright and early that Mrs. Travers was brought into the ER hemorrhaging into her GI tract, temperature soaring, and BP dropping fast. He didn't work on her, but he heard later about the septic ulcer.

Dr. Wycoff didn't know what he was doing because Mrs. Travers didn't tell anyone she usually took three aspirin several times a day because of her fibroids. She'd thought the pain from the stomach ulcer was just more GYN pain. So for several days at least, she added to her aspirin habit a whiskey habit, the latter of which Hawkeye had suspected but didn't put down on her chart because she was the wife of the hospital's director and it was hospital policy to protect Travers from himself out of interest of one's job. Wycoff hadn't gotten the patient's full history because when the secretary called Hawkeye the previous night, Hawkeye had forgotten what he hadn't written down.

No one got in trouble. After all, the woman had poisoned herself and withdrawn information from her doctors. There was some discussion about locking down the records so doctors could feel comfortable putting embarrassing details on important patients' charts, but nothing much came of it. Sitting there in the smoke-filled doctor's lounge, Hawkeye pondered how this would have played out in the Army, if some general had drank himself septic, and he knew what he and Trapper would have done. They wouldn't have been cowed by the brass. They would have told the general to stop drinking; they would have put the guy in surgery and done the damn hysterectomy to relieve his chronic pain, even if standard practice said that a general of twenty-three years can't have a hysterectomy because he might want babies later and sue the hospital.

Hawkeye told Wycoff he was taking off a year to write, letting the nervous department head think his best doctor was writing a medical publication that would earn the hospital prestige. Lena soothed his concerns, worried about money, and finally found them the Sipsis commune. They needed fresh air and real people, she said. She was going whether Hawkeye went with her or not.

As Lena skipped them down her yellow brick road paved with good intentions - onward to meet her solid Tin Man - Hawkeye the Cowardly Lion slipped further into isolation.


	8. Chapter 8

Title: "Marigold Wine" part 8/?  
Author: lj user="Aura218"  
Pairing: Hawkeye/Trapper, Hawkeye/others  
Genre: Drama, romance, longfic, postseries, 60s  
Summary: In the 60s, Trapper visits his old army buddy at a hippie commune, where Hawkeye has retreated to find peace.  
Rating: R/M

Read: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

| Part 7

Read on for: Part 8

Trapper opened his eyes to the sound of childish yelping and a lot of cold dripping on his person. Hawkeye, still half draped on his belly, started, and clipped Trapper in the rips with his pointy wizard's chin.

"What's wrong, what's - who's hurt?" Hawkeye stumbled to his feet.

Trapper grabbed up Sunny so no one tripped on him.

"You lump," Trapper growled at Hawkeye.

"Hawkeye, look!" Jeremiah, the drippy one standing over them, skipped around the pebbly beach. "My pole caught a fish!"

Hawkeye scrubbed at his face; Trapper knew that look, it meant he didn't entirely know where he was. Sunny fussed. Trapper tried not to jostle him as shoved Hawkeye off his lap so he could sit up. He was going pink all over the parts of his skin Hawkeye hadn't covered.

"What do you mean, your pole caught a fish?" Hawkeye asked.

"He left his pole stuck in the rocks while we were swimming." Siva pulled a towel out of Lena's bag, which Trapper had been sleeping on.

Hawkeye said to Jeremiah, "You could have swam into the hook. It could have made you sick."

Jeremiah's face fell.

"Hawkeye," Lena said. She wrapped a blanket around Jeremiah's shoulders and chuffed him warm.

Siva said to her, "This is what I mean."

"What did I say?" Hawkeye said.

Trapper subtly stepped back, heading for quieter ground with the still wubbling baby in his arms.

"Look," Hawkeye said to Siva, "I don't mean to insult you, but it is my medical opinion that impaling oneself with a dirty, rusty fishhook is hazardous to one's health."

Siva padded slowly away, chuckling at the sky in a way that made Trapper nervous. "Don't you hear yourself? Do you seriously think I'd let my son or my _girlfriend_ swim with a dirty fish hook?"

"Excuse me -" Hawkeye started.

"I am not your girlfriend!" Lena said.

Jeremiah stood backed up against the boulders, clutching his fish in a dish towel, looking scared.

"That fishing line is six feet long, _six feet_," Siva said. "You think I'm so stupid I can't figure out how to keep my kid out of a six foot circle of water? You think I need an old _drunk_ tell me that a fishhook is dangerous?"

Trapper looked up into the trees. So it was going to be like that.

Hawkeye turned white with just two spots of color on his cheeks. Trapper had never seen him so angry he actually couldn't speak. Lightening seem to gather in his dark blue eyes. Trapper considered that if it came to blows, Hawkeye didn't have a chance against a guy half his age and twice his weight. Hawkeye may be a scrappy survivor, but he relied on his mouth to get him out of physical altercations.

"You two are disgusting," Lena took Jeremiah by the hand. "One of you bring me my bag before nightfall. Trapper?"

Trapper handed over the baby, not daring to speak or even make eye contact. Not since Margaret had he seen a woman cut through the bull with a surgeon's precision.

Lena led Jeremiah to the woods path back to the camp. "Dear heart, let's go fry up that fish. It looks delicious, we'll have a feast. Hawkeye and your daddy don't want any, they'll be eating crow tonight . . ."

Her voice drifted through the trees, admonishing them on the breeze.

Hawkeye and Siva stared at each other across the grassy bank. Trapper, without a baby to give him something to do, moseyed over to the flat rock bank and picked up the lunch dishes. He kept an ear to his friend and the scowling manchild glowing at him.

"I'm sorry," Hawkeye said. "I just, I got worried. I didn't mean to step in like that."

Siva kicked the pebbles. "I'm sorry I called you names. It was childish."

"It was also true," Hawkeye said.

Siva looked away, across the lake. Trapper pretended he didn't know he was being noticed. Siva crossed his arms up over his head and seemed to physically shake the argument off. Hawkeye watched him warily. Trapper kept them in his peripheral vision, ready to leap in as a buddy or a jealous lover, whatever he was in this strange situation. Siva still seemed capable of throwing a punch.

"You're with him now?" Siva shrugged one thick shoulder at Trapper.

Hawkeye nodded. "Looks like."

"Don't you ever stay in one place for a more than five minutes?" Siva sounded annoyed, a touch of whine coming into his voice.

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing. I just - It was much easier before."

Hawkeye nodded. "Do you miss that?"

"No," Siva said. "You're a jerk when you drink."

"Ah." Hawkeye slung his thumbs in his pockets and rocked back on his heels.

"I just wish it was easier. I wish my kid didn't like you."

Trapper was glad he didn't see that expression Hawkeye put on often. That "I don't care what you have to say, I'm completely innocent" expression. It was completely affected and didn't fool anyone who knew Hawkeye intimately.

Hawkeye put his hands up over his head, breathing in the hot summer air. "I'm involved with his mother."

"Yup," Siva said. "You're not a Hindu, either. I'm trying to raise him right."

Hawkeye laughed, flopping his arms at his side. "You can raise him Hindu or Jewish or Sacred Cows of the Latter Day Druids for all I care."

"You could be a little more respectful of my ways," Siva said. Hawkeye snorted. "And you could show up when you say you will, and stop drinking when you say you will, and you could make up your mind about Lena and stop sleeping around with other guys."

Hawkeye looked him in the eye. "I'm working on my promises to Jeremiah and Sunny, and the drinking bit. As for Lena and Trapper, I'm starting to think that's something you just won't ever understand."

Siva stood high, throwing his shoulders back. "I'm starting to think you're right."

Hawkeye stared at him, confused. At last, he shrugged. "Okay then."

"Okay?"

Hawkeye gestured in the air, at a loss. "I don't know, you tell me. Are we okay?"

"Yeah, I guess so."

Trapper watched the two men part ways. Siva loped into the woods, pride and masculinity radiating off of him. Hawkeye followed Trapper to the water's edge, thumbs in his cutoffs, confused and thoughtful.

"I swear I don't know what's gotten into him." Hawkeye sat beside Trapper. He picked up a clean dish and washed it.

"C'mon, Hawkeye." Trapper stacked the bowls in Lena's big basket. "What were you at twenty-four?"

Hawkeye shrugged. "A smart-ass cutie pie. But that was another time. It was a lifetime ago. A completely different war was on."

Trapper cinched the bag and shook out the drips. "Siva is twenty-four, he had a kid at nineteen, and got involved with someone else twelve years older than he was."

"That was his choice, you know." More of that innocence. "It would have taken more effort to keep him out of my bed."

Trapper believed him that much. Youth bred confidence, or the affectation thereof. "I'm just saying, when you sleep with people in their twenties, you have to deal with twenty-year-old bullshit."

Hawkeye shook his head sadly. By the way Hawkeye fussed with the silverware, lining them up by type just to throw them in the net bag, Trapper knew this wasn't the first time he had thought such a thing. But it was the first time he'd thought it live in front of a studio audience.

"Are you okay?" Trapper said.

Hawkeye flipped the silverware into the net bag, seeming to take private glee from the cacophony.

"Sure. Fine. It's just. Some of what he said was really below the belt, wasn't it?" Hawkeye was nearly pouting.

Trapper fought a smile. "Sure. He didn't have to get personal-like."

"I'm not a drunk, I'm an alcoholic."

"The first step is admitting you're not a drunk."

Trapper slipped his arms around Hawkeye's waist, wanting to soothe away the despair beneath the clowning. He rested his chin on Hawkeye's shoulder.

With utter sincerity, Trapper whispered, "You're just taking a minute to catch your breath. Lots of veterans do. You're even being productive, you're writing a book. How many people can say that?"

Hawkeye pressed his forehead against Trapper's, closing his eyes. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here."

Trapper kissed him there on the rock with their toes at the bottom of the lake, their thighs knocking against each other when the current swept them. Hawkeye buried his hand in Trapper's curls, drawing him closer, deepening the kiss. Trapper still couldn't believe that this crazy thing between them was less than twenty-four hours old, yet felt so right and normal. It felt like home. He could fall in love in this vacation outside the world, if he let it happen.

He was just about to suggest they hie they ho back to Hawkeye's cabin, when a branch snapped behind them. Trapper pulled away from Hawkeye's lips with an audible pop. He detangled himself from Hawkeye's arms and legs - truly, the man was part squid - so quickly they both almost fell in the lake. Behind them, a pebble clattered to the shore.

Trapper had a strange, out of body experience that he might be in the pictures. Standing behind them, staring with wide, dark eyes, was a little Indian child dressed head to toe in hand-sewn leather trousers, a beaded necklace, and leather moccasins. Trapper could only guess it was a girl by the corn husk dolly clutched in the child's hand.

"Hullo . . ." he attempted.

The kid grinned and hid her face behind her dolly. She was perhaps five? Trapper glanced sidelong at Hawkeye. He was swallowing hard, Adam's apple bobbing, a sure sign of too many thoughts clicking by in his overactive head.

"Did you lose your mommy?" Trapper asked. "Or maybe your, uh, spiritual babysitter?"

"I don't know this kid," Hawkeye said quietly.

Trapper glanced at him. "So? Maybe there's more visitors today."

"I don't think so."

Trapper looked him over, curious.

"Look." Hawkeye nodded up the coast.

Like something out of an apocalyptic movie, more of them were coming. They were in skins, woven fabrics, or bare skin. The men walked ahead, the women behind, the children who couldn't be carried walked behind them.

Hawkeye maneuvered the little girl between Trapper and himself.

* * *

High up in the trees, a pine plank bird blind hung suspended above the forest. The Robinsons, the elderly artists, were strapped into lawn chairs, which were themselves bolted to their treehouse floor.

"Mrs. Robinson," Mr. Robinson said, "do you see a group of Indians by the lake?"

"No, Mr. Robinson," she said without looking up from her watercolor of a yellow-rumped warbler. "Antelope Hill was your father's war."

Hastily, Mr. Robinson unbuckled his belt. The whole platform shook. Mrs. Robinson's paints rattled in their tray.

"Mr. Robinson, do be careful!"

He shoved his binoculars at her and scampered down the pole shockingly fast for a man who had given up the stress of weekend trousers in recent years. Mrs. Robinson recovered her husband's discarded binoculars. She focused the twin lenses on the lake.

"Oh dear."

On the ground, Mr. Robinson darted into their cabin. The shuffling of paper could be heard from within.

* * *

"Are they an army?" Trapper asked. He stood with Hawkeye on the wood's edge, behind a blueberry bush. Lena's net bags of clean dishes that lay disregarded on the dirt trailhead.

"An army of ideas," Hawkeye said. "Which is harder to fight."

The group was approaching from the east, seemingly growing in numbers as more emerged from the woods. They congregated on the bank in small groups. They weren't actual Native Americans. Trapper saw more white bodies and fair hair than any other ethnicity, although there were enough Black and middle tones to balance out the group. The men looked older than the women, although a wild-man beard and xylophone ribs could add age to any kid.

They seemed disorganized, a mingling band of people waiting for a bus, until the women started lining up at the water's edge. Children were called, bags were unpacked. Trapper felt like he was seeing nomadic life as it had been lived thousands of years ago. Perhaps as old as it could get. The men kept walking up the bank until they found a spot they appeared to like. They stripped and dove in.

"Mr. and Mrs. Robinson told me about them," Hawkeye said. "They came here about two summers ago. They're bad news."

A woman called "May! May!" into the clear air. The child between Hawkeye and Trapper dropped her dolly and ran, meeting a teenish looking girl at the water's edge. The child burst into tears as they were reunited. By now, the women had made serious headway setting up camp at the water's edge. People were building fires, kids were getting scrubbed.

"They're fundamentalist hippies," Trapper whispered.

"Yeah," Hawkeye said. "We should tell someone."

As Trapper turned to go, he took one last look. There were maybe sixty, seventy? There were a lot of little kids, but then it seemed almost every woman was attached to a few of her own - except . . .

"My God," Trapper whispered.

Hawkeye scurried to gather up Lena's bag. He threw a glance at the salads in bowls they had forgotten in the river, but didn't bother to collect them.

Trapper couldn't move. There, hanging back from the bank, rooting through a goat cart. He watched her work. A young woman with wavy, strawberry-blonde hair.

"Trap, let's go." Hawkeye tugged on his elbow.

As she leaned over, a necklace slipped out of her shift. The sunlight caught on the charm.

"We need to warn the kids," Hawkeye said.

"Huh?" Trapper took one last look, and followed Hawkeye away.

Hawkeye ran ahead down the path, barefoot, while Trapper shoved on his sneakers and tried to keep up despite his racing thoughts.

Thank god she was wearing regular clothes. Trapper probably wouldn't have recognized Becky dressed like an Indian, despite his college caduceus charm around her neck.


	9. Chapter 9

Title: "Marigold Wine" part 9/?  
Pairing: Hawkeye/Trapper, Hawkeye/others  
Genre: Drama, romance, longfic, postseries, 60s  
Summary: In the 60s, Trapper visits his old army buddy at a hippie commune, where Hawkeye has retreated to find peace.  
Rating: R/M

Part 9

Honestly, these men. She didn't know where Siva or the boys got up to tonight and didn't care. Halfway down the hill, Lena handed the baby to Jeremiah so she could put her shirt back on. Wouldn't Grandma Pearl have words for her if she strutted half naked past the lettuce patch with a baby on her hip. She'd think Lena was the second coming of the goddess Oester.

Jeremiah was quiet as he walked beside her. Lena didn't know if quiet was good or troublesome. Lena wasn't raised with demonstrative emotion, but these Americans - Hawkeye especially - seemed to let their every thought dribble from their lips like water. She'd learned a lot about trust and friendship with Hawkeye, and especially at the commune, and most particularly when she invited Siva into their family.

It had been a simple, decision, really, but not easy. Over a year ago, when she and Hawkeye had been living at the commune for only a month, still figuring out what it meant to share bicycles and meals, Siva had become besotted with her husband. He was flagrant, possessive of Hawkeye's time and his mind, claimed he was writing a book of poems about veterans and wanted to hear Hawkeye's thoughts. When Lena came home to find the two of them in bed together, she realized she had a decision: she was pregnant, she loved Hawkeye, Siva was her best friend and she loved Jeremiah already. This didn't need to be complicated. So she uncomplicated it.

It wasn't complicated . . . until it was. Hawkeye was so broken, Siva so angry about the American "race thing," and her boys needed parents. The bickering started within months. Hawkeye embraced free love in theory, but in practice, he was woefully old fashioned and not as near as free minded as he thought he was. And Siva was having hang-ups about homosexual sex that no of them had predicted, especially when his parents started sending letters asking him what he was doing with his life - telling him to find a Black mother to make his family complete again. Hawkeye flatly refused to discuss the race matter, his answer to the problem being that it didn't exist to him, and Lena believed that it really didn't; but it did to Siva, and for that reason he really should have listened with his ears instead of his mouth. Siva didn't like being told how to feel about his own race discomfort. That was around the time Siva decided he didn't like sex with white men anymore.

Lena's hopes for a big family fell down among problems that were so far from the protective umbrella of love, togetherness, and one nation that Sitsips was based upon.

Jeremiah, clutching his fish to his chest, slung his slightly damp hand in hers. She gave it a squeeze. Sunny pulled at her shirt, reciting his new favorite word: "Mok?" All her years of covering up her décolleté, and now she had a short, fat, bald fellow strapped to her chest begging to suck on her nipples in public.

"Is Hawkeye mad?" Jeremiah said.

Lena had asked her foster mother a question like this once. She was scolded, not so much for eavesdropping on grownup business, as being preternaturally grownup enough to be attuned to adult emotions.

"Yes, dear heart," Lena said. "But not at you. Hawkeye and Siva are having a disagreement."

Jeremiah stopped walking. Lena, tethered to him, stopped as well. Sun beat down through the gaps in the trees. He peered up at her with his piercing green eyed gaze.

"I like Hawkeye," he pronounced.

When Lena was a child, she wasn't permitted to like or dislike any adult. They were simply there, like a bulky piece of antique furniture.

"I'm very glad of that. He loves you very much," Lena said. She had lived with Hawkeye for thirteen months before she could say the L-word half as often as he babbled strings of love metaphors and puns and allegories at her.

"Sometimes I don't like him or my dad," Jeremiah said.

Lena led him down the hill. Doctor Spock said, "You're allowed your feelings."

"Why do they fight?" Jeremiah said.

Lena squeezed his hand. "I don't know, my little love. Sometimes it just doesn't work out between - friends. But they love you very much."

Jeremiah smiled shyly.

Gaining confidence, Lena tried for advanced parenting: "Do you think if they both apologize for ruining your day, you can forgive them?"

Jeremiah heaved a dramatic, grownup sigh. "I guess I can let it go this once."

"Oh, my love, how you make me laugh!" she said.

Lena reached to hug him, but he twirled like a ballerina, holding her fingers for balance.

"Can we eat my fish now?" Jeremiah said. "He's getting stinky."

Lena turned him so he was walking properly downhill. She pointed over the treetops to the commune center and kitchen. "What do you see there?"

"Smoke?"

Lena followed his gaze. No, not smoke, steam. The kitchen ovens in the compound were stoked to a high blaze. By the sun, it was only three or so; their shadows were stumpy and trollish.

"Are we respecting someone's beliefs again?" Jeremiah said.

Lena led him to the path that circled around the back of the cistern, so she could have a clear view down the open field behind the metal longhouse that served as both her classroom and the compound cafeteria. Through the vented window, she could see a half-dozen men, unfamiliar to her, dressed in animal skins, milling about in the longhouse. They seemed to be talking to the Sitsips college students who hung out there in the afternoons around mealtime. Lena hadn't spoken to many of those kids who came up from the universities this year, but they usually were semi-appreciable workers, good sorts from good suburban homes, if a bit whiny about the lack of television. The newcomers were giving Lena a bad vibe. They were sharing ideas, in the open minded counter culture sense; rapping, jiving. Be it women's instinct, or wisdom of age and veteran status, but Lena could tell by the aura given off from the new people that she wouldn't like what they had to say.

Lena turned back down the hill. "I . . . I think the kitchen is spoken for tonight. Let's just roast it on a campfire, we'll see if Grandma Pearl will show you how to make a mud pack oven."

Jeremiah trudged behind her. "Lena, that sounds like a yucky thing to do to Frank."

"Frank?" Lena's bare foot caught on a root. The weight of Sunny overbalanced her. She stumbled and caught herself on a sapling, nearly snapping it in two.

"Hawkeye says all dead fish are called Frank." Jeremiah chattered on, unaware.

"Please don't argue with me, dear heart." Sunny began to fuss as they crossed into the woods path. Lena covered his head with her free hand. If only she could stop to nurse. . . . Why did she feel like she was being pursued? This was like a bad dream.

Jeremiah tried for a different tact. "I thought you said we're s'posed to share all our food." Strangers of any stripe were more interesting than the same old hundred people he saw every day.

They had reached the fork in the woods path. Lena stopped abruptly. Jeremiah stared up at her expectantly. For a horrified moment of suspended panic, her mind hung in indecision. This neighborhood of the woods, which she'd walked every day of the past year, looked as unfamiliar as a street in a city she'd never visited.

"I believe the boy is correct," called a rumbling voice. "I was told the Sitsips Commune is _communal_."

Lena turned. The man was huge. No, merely tall. His presence was huge. His beard was a separate, parasitic entity that hung to his sternum. His hair tickled his elbows and was growing in thick clumps. Jeremiah drew closer to Lena.

"Excuse me?" Lena said.

"Can I? Do I have that authority over your existence?" The man loped closer to her.

He was coming from the T-intersection that wound to the other part of the lake, Lena realized. Walking away would lead her to the women's cabin. Irrationally, she wanted to disguise her planned route from him.

"I'm called Bear by my people," the man said.

"That's very nice." Lena had nowhere to go but the path to the women's barn.

Bear was rickety but fast. In a flurry of disturbed vegetation and a cloud of odor, he was blocking her path again. He grinned at her, showing his bicuspids. Bicuspid. One was missing.

"And you are?"

Lena straightened her spine. "I'm the schoolteacher."

Bear came closer, one foot before the other, hands jangling at his sides. "What a coincidence. I am a student of life." He reached out. Lena, revolted, was too scared to smack it away, though she could envision herself doing just that, despite the appalling manners of doing so. His red-brown fingertip with its dirt-rimed nails tucked into the palm of Sunny's clean, pink hand.

"I welcome this spaceship to our world," the strange man said to her son.

Sunny stared. His upper lip reared up. He pealed out one long, high shriek.

"Lena?" Jeremiah said.

Lena took three swift strides around the horrible creature - into the bushes, through the weeds, onto the path. She dragged Jeremiah behind so hard she could have pulled his arm out of the socket. Without looking back, holding onto Jeremiah's arm so tightly he had to run to keep up with her, she marched down the path to the women's cabin.

She pretended she didn't hear Bear shout "We would like to watch your baby!" or feel her nipples tighten. His gravely voice felt like callused fingers stroking her skin.

* * *

"I gave her mother that necklace when we were dating," Trapper said.

He was pacing Hawkeye's cabin like a caged animal. Bathing suits had been shucked and abandoned on the posts of ladder-back chairs. Trousers had been procured. Hawkeye perched on the edge of the sofa, watched him warily.

"Trap, colleges give out thousands of those a year."

"No, not like this. It's got a shamrock on it, white enamel with emerald inlays. That was Louise's good luck charm, she wore it to all my games. I saw the glint in the sunlight." Trapper slapped his fist into his palm, unaware of himself.

Hawkeye, bare to the waist, sat back, pensive. "On the one hand, I hate to point out that there's more than one Irish doctor in America."

Trapper, standing in his cutoffs in front of the fireplace, gestured vaguely, giving him that.

"On the other," Hawkeye said, "you said Becky was lost and alone. Sometimes these groups offer all the answers to kids like that."

"That's ridiculous," Trapper said.

"Why?"

"She's not that kind of girl."

"Trap -" Hawkeye stood.

"I don't believe this!" Trapper stared at Hawkeye, eyes pleading. Hawkeye reached for him, but Trapper turned away. "_I_ had all the answers she needed! Come live with us, we'll pay for school! Get a job, we'll help you find an apartment! Find a goddamn husband or even a fucking roommate and stop living like a damned - a - a damned - !"

Trapper punched the wall. Not hard. He needed to hit something and it was there. He couldn't wreck his hands - he was still a surgeon. He stood there, breathing hard at it, because if he turned around Hawkeye would be watching him and then he'd laugh, because he was so angry that he was going to either laugh or cry and he just wanted to be angry.

"Was she on drugs?" Hawkeye asked quietly.

Trapper pressed his forehead against the cool wall. "Why couldn't she just be . . . normal."

"What's normal?" Hawkeye's voice sounded very far off from the action, like the narrator in _The Twilight Zone_. The guy with all the answers who can explain the weirdness you just watched for half an hour.

I wish I was normal, Trapper thought. "I wish she had it easier," he said instead.

Trapper felt Hawkeye behind him, his warmth and his presence. He was scaring his lover. Hawkeye's hands were light as bird's wings uncertainly attempting to stroke his shoulders. Trapper sighed and leaned back into the touch. Hawkeye's arms circled around his waist and he leaned his head back onto Hawkeye's shoulder. Chest to back, hands on his belly, he covered them with his own. Hawkeye kissed his earlobe.

"And I thought diapers were the most difficult part," Hawkeye said.

Trapper barked a laugh. "Take it from a veteran, don't teach 'em to talk. It's not worth it."

Hawkeye kissed his smile. "That's for fortitude."

"Why?"

"Because we need to talk to my wife."

* * *

Lena desperately wanted to dig a burrow under the corn crib and hide there with her boys and never come out. But what would that solve? If no one questioned men like Bear, why would they leave? She didn't think of this as bravery so much as survival. Most communes lasted a season or two before egos, failed crops, or sex brought down their ideals. Sitsips was in its fifth_ year_. If she and Hawkeye couldn't live here, where could they? If she, Hawkeye, Sunny, Jeremiah, and Siva were fishes and birds falling in love, Sitsips was the place where they could make their home.

She left the boys with Grandma Pearl in the women's barn and set out on the path. Away from shelter. Into the woods.

It was merely logic that led her to the center of the commune, the compound with the pretty potted flowers and artwork, the largest structure on forty acres of land. Where else would a guy like Bear lead his revolution? Lena told herself she wasn't going back in time as she saw the clutch of women and old people outside the long metal schoolhouse, because she had been far too little to remember the S.S. roundups or the train to the ghettos. This wasn't history repeating itself. It certainly wasn't going to be once she got down there and assessed things.

Approaching the disorganized group of co-eds, artists, and old people, Lena could hear Mrs. Robinson's voice above them. Mr. Robinson was passing around papers and shouting at people. Mrs. Robinson appeared to be running the show.

Bethany - a girl with hair so long she often sat on it - passed a yellowing newspaper clipping pasted to a dismembered scrapbook page to Lena. The rest of the college-age women and moms like her were reading similar material.

"They are only as dangerous as we make them!" Mrs. Robinson was saying to one frightened woman - Sable, Lena remembered, who had two boys older than Jeremiah. They had played records together at the dance.

"They're a menace!" Mr. Robinson said.

"My God, look at this," Lena read her clipping aloud. "'The group is lead by Robert Thomas, "Bear," 42, who claims to receive spiritual guidance from a Hindu Guru.' I just met him!"

"Is that like their God?" Bethany said.

"Are you in college? It's like a teacher," said Alera, Bethany's sometimes friend, who wore her hair in a Natural.

Lena read on. "'The cult -' the reporter actually wrote that word - 'which calls itself "Exincunabula or "out of the swaddling clothes" has twice been accused of kidnapping, illegal possession of drugs -"

"What better kind?" Bethany said. Several people laughed. In a place where eight-year-olds sipped from their parents' cups of marigold wine at midsummer dances, Lena could hardly see the harm in a little pot.

"- and have harassed local communities with their decentralized and nomadic lifestyles.' This is last year, the Boulder _City News_," Lena said.

"That's very poor Latin," Mr. Robinson said.

Bethany flipped her long hair. "Well, what's wrong with that? So they move around a lot. Of course the press doesn't understand our lifestyle, especially if we get a little too much notice from Mr. and Mrs. Middle America."

Mr. Robinson shook his finger at her. Bethany stepped back, surprised. "No, no, silly young woman."

"They're no good," Mrs. Robinson said. "Look how we've arranged ourselves as a society since they've arrived. In just one hour, are we all equals? Don't you see who is outside, and who is inside?"

The group outside the longhouse took itself in. They were women. The very old and the very young. Only young men had been invited to the Exincunabula club meeting. Lena remembered how that Bear fellow had given her a very proprietary look.

"What about the kidnapping charge?" Lena asked the Robinsons. "Did some teenagers run away from home and join them?"

Mr. Robinson said, "Teenagers deserve what they get."

"Hey!" Bethany said. "I'm nineteen!"

Mr. Robinson waved her off with a flap of his hand. Bethany looked positively disgusted.

Mrs. Robinson handed Lena another scrapbook. "A couple whose daughter joined this Exincunabula group went to the police. The parents did, not the daughter. They said their granddaughter just disappeared, and their daughter seems to have no memory of her."

There was a flutter from the other women assembled. Lena felt her mouth going dry.

"What . . . I don't understand," Lena said.

"What happened to the baby?" Bethany asked.

"If they knew, the paper wouldn't say Missing Persons," Alera said.

Bethany frowned. "They looked so groovy with their handmade leathers."

"I thought you were a vegetarian," Alera said.

"It's vegetarian if you use the whole animal."

Lena hardly heard the chatter as she read another article, this one from New Mexico. Another case of the grandparents saying their grandchild had gone missing and their own child seeming not to care. The missing child's mother refused to leave the Exincunabula commune-or-cult. Where were the fathers? How could this happen in America?

"This is unbelievable. A child just disappeared? How could this happen?" Lena said.

"They have homes all over the country and some in South America," Mrs. Robinson said. "This reporter -" she handed out another sheaf of papers - "says Bear has them practicing a form of paganism that honors the earth mother Gaia as parent to all, and parent to none. He's been quoted saying 'the tyranny of birth shall be shown as mere accident, not fate.'"

"I kind of like that," Bethany said.

"The hell?" Alera said.

"No, think about it. Is it really fair that you get stuck with the parents you do?" she said. "I mean, my parents didn't support my artistic ability. I have so much catching up to do, if only they'd enrolled me in more art classes as a child!"

"You don't have the artistry God gave a mule's butt," Alera said. "Your parents are your parents, period."

"Regardless," Mrs. Robinson said, "his movement is growing."

Lena handed the papers back to Mr. Robinson. "I can imagine why. Just look at that group."

They looked. Inside the longhouse, Bear might have been telling a particularly thrilling hunting legend to a group of cross-legged, awed Boy Scouts. There was discussion among them, joking, a lot of exposing their deepest thoughts.

"They're bonding," Alera said.

A crazy plan is full of crazy people, Lena thought. How dumb could a bunch of twenty-year-old boys be? An individual was fairly intelligent. A group of humans, wrapped up in a charismatic leader, and drugged to the rafters with mind-opening drugs that made Bugs Bunny seem like a classical philosopher? She'd seen this before. She'd seen the weak try to stand in the way of this kind of bull-headed might, and seen what had happened to those who made a fuss.

"I get it," Bethany said.

"We know you do," Alera said.

"Listen," Bethany said, "what do people like Osiris and, you know, the younger guys? The philosophy students, the kids who came here to expand their mind? What do smart, creative people really like more than anything else?"

"Magic mushrooms?" Alera said.

"She means," Lena said, "a philosophical ideal."

There was chatter in response to that from the other women in the crowd. Who could deny that Sitsips was a place to try on as many varied, colored, multidesigned hats as one could find, dream up, or discover in the stars while high? Lena wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly cold in the late afternoon sunlight.

Mrs. Robinson waved her arms wide, papers shuffling in the air like feathers. She corralled the group into a lump.

"Come now, ladies. Back to the henhouse, I'll show you all how to have a Quaker women's meeting and get things taken care of. Mr. Robinson, you shall keep watch here?"

They bid Mr. Robinson and the longhouse a grateful goodbye and started up the hill. Lena cast a glance over her shoulder in the longhouse. Stuck between two boys dressed like Indians, smoking a peace pipe, was Siva. He appeared to be listening intently, his expression was unreadable to her. Far off, thunder grumbled, threatening its approach.

Prestorm wind kicked up, flipping the leaves in the trees to show their white underbellies. A shiver went down Lena's spine.

* * *

After they dressed, Hawkeye and Trapper headed straight for the women's cabin. Standing hesitantly at the entryway, without Lena as their Virgil's guide into the deep, the two war veterans verily trembled in the face of the cabin's oppressive femininity.

There were cut flowers on every available surface. Six cats had taken over the sofa, yet it wasn't covered in hair. In the front room, which was sunny and colorfully decorated for children and also monitored at all times per schedule sheet hung on the wall, a little boy was putting a dress on a rubber doll and a little girl was building a tower out of blocks.

Someone had duct taped a box of maxipads to the wall and cut an opening to dispense one at a time.

"Well," Hawkeye said, noticing it a second after Trapper did. "That's certainly convenient."

"This is like opposite town," Trapper said, holding on to Hawkeye's shoulder lest an attack of the vapors strike. "We better not stay in here too long or we'll start wearing their bras and snapping our jockey shorts."

The two guys picked carefully through a stand of A-frames holding drying paintings. The themes on the canvases seeming to be lesbianism, murder, and high heels. At the end of the grove of sawhorses, the artist, a girl of about sixteen, gave them a cheery smile.

"Ah, honey -" Trapper addressed her.

The sunshine smile disappeared. The girl's dark eyebrow arched to a point over her pinpoint blue eyes.

"Miss," Trapper corrected. Her expression held. Her lips were the perfect apple red of a fairy tale princess's stepmother. "Ma'am?"

"Pandora, have you seen Lena?" Hawkeye said.

The girl was all smiles again. "Sure, Hawkeye, she's upstairs in the drawing room."

"Thank you."

As they moved away, Trapper hissed, "How come she's Miss Congeniality for you?"

Hawkeye covered his mouth and muttered, "Use no terms of endearment in here without express written permission, unless you want your testicles to end up in the soup."

Trapper had to admit, this was by far the most civilized building he had seen on the compound. The walls were made of regular building material, there was a floor, it was decorated half to death, and everyone seemed busy. Rooms were labeled for their use, the labels had explanations beneath them, and beneath the explanations were amendments and iterations to the explanations. Trapper remembered many occasions when army nurses simply amazed him as forces of female capability. He didn't know how women did it - how did the sofas stay clean, how did the rules get made, how did all that happen with all the gabbing they always did? Louise's church group couldn't decide on a lunch date without everyone taking ten minutes to discuss their family and medical problems. The one time Trapper had stepped in to speed things along, he'd been . . . summarily rejected, to say the least.

"So, how did the girls get the big house and the men all live in little hovels?" Trapper asked.

"They said if we let them fix it up, they'd give it back when they were done," Hawkeye said.

"So why haven't they?"

"They're not done yet."

Trapper snorted. They were moving down a long hallway marked with arches to rooms branching off, possibly in search of a staircase. So much _stuff_ was packed in here, and so many bodies, he could hardly see a foot in front of himself. Someone's pet python regarded him languidly from a chickenwire cage build into a closet. He stepped around it, carefully. A purple poesy sign over the cage read, "Please don't pet Fluffy, she's still adjusting to humanity."

Hawkeye shrugged. "It was a dump. The roof was falling in, we didn't know how to fix that. They brought in some, y'know, some of those sorts of girls."

Trapper laughed. "You mean women with power tools?"

"Yeah."

"Hawkeye." Trapper grabbed him by the back of the shirt and tugged, crashing them together. He kissed him, thoroughly. Some girls in an adjacent room whooped.

Trapper said, "You _are_ 'one of those sorts' of people."

Hawkeye nudged Trapper off, playfully. "Anyway. The girls got organized. Lena says it's scientifically proven that women should live in groups like cats and men live in little hovels like poisonous snakes."

"So?"

"How could we say no? They're cute and have claws. We gave them the barn and slunk off into the woods like the cold blooded reptiles we are."

"That doesn't sound very communal."

Hawkeye shrugged. "The eternal struggle: biological imperative versus intellectualism."

"Crunchy versus creamy."

They mounted a ladder. The second floor opened up to a loft of shotgun-style rooms. This area was less finished and seemed more of a work area than living. Cordoned off areas were designated by artful names painted on the rafters over the center of the rooms. The "drawing room" where they found Lena was packed with a bookcase, lumpy bean bag chairs, typewriters on a rolltop desk, a long bay of plywood work desks, even a few music stands. A corner of the room was segregated by a pink boundary painted on the floor. A sign read "Paint Corner - please spray away from others." The walls on that side were utterly covered in paint, glitter, string, leaves - was that rabbit fur?

Lena was with the kids, she on the floor, feet tucked under her, doing calligraphy across the tops of thick, homey looking paper. Rolls of leather and heavy metal tools were also out. She seemed to be piecing diaries with epigrams on various pages.

Hawkeye bent beside Lena and kissed Sunny while he played with two dry paintbrushes. To Trapper's surprise, Jeremiah, in one of the beanbag chairs doing a page of subtraction, got up and hugged and kissed both of them.

"I'm sorry I ruined your fishing trip, pal," Hawkeye whispered.

"I forgive you," Jeremiah said.

"Thank you."

Jeremiah shrugged, aw shucks, no big deal. He went back to his math. Curious, Trapper tried the beanbag chair beside the boy. He'd seen these in stores but never wanted to appear this undignified in public. He sunk in more than he expected. It felt good on the two vertebrae that gave him trouble at work but wrenched his bad knee. He tried to wiggle himself up, but slumped back down again. Whatever.

Jeremiah was watching him over his notebook.

"Do your math, kid," Trapper said.

Jeremiah giggled.

Hawkeye knelt beside Lena. "We saw them arrive."

"They're meeting with the college boys and the others in the longhouse. Just men." Lena didn't look up.

"I see."

Lena looked up briefly, didn't meet his eyes. "Have you talked to the Robinsons?"

Hawkeye nodded. "We saw them on the path. They filled us in."

"One lawsuit doesn't prove anything," Trapper said, caution in his voice. It didn't not prove anything, either.

"Well." Lena selected an awl, a hammer, and drove the metal spike into the fleshy material. "Until the men decide something, I'll be working."

She looked down at her work, subtly dismissing them. Hawkeye glanced at Trapper, as uncertain as Trapper felt. He wasn't familiar with this side of Lena. Was this anger? He'd gone with a few girls who got like this right before they blew. Lena didn't seem the passive-aggressive type.

"Why?" Hawkeye touched her arm.

"Because." Her voice was clipped, her hands professional and spare as she put a sheaf of papers into a binding clamp. "There's not much I can do about them, is there? And in the meantime, the folk fair is in August and I have thirty self actualizing journals to calligraphy, bind, and back in leather. Add to that, four hundred bars of soap to make and label, and berries to can -"

"Hon -"

"The income pays for your child's food," she said.

"I'll help you. I did last year, didn't I?" Hawkeye said.

"When you weren't typing away," she said.

Hawkeye looked lost.

"I'll help," Trapper put in.

"Me too," Jeremiah said.

Lena gave them the sort of tolerant smile your friend's mom gives you when you got her kid in minor trouble but she can't punish you.

"Lena, sweetheart, listen, we need your help -" Hawkeye said.

"Don't sweetheart me!" she snapped. "I'm very busy right now, Hawkeye."

Hawkeye leaned back on his haunches, shocked. "Lena, these Excu-Excula-whatever people - this isn't the end of the world."

Lena pointed the business end of her awl at him. "Don't you tell me, Benjamin Franklin Pierce, how I should be feeling about outsiders walking into my town and changing everything. They - telling us how we should do things? And those little idiots may just go along with it, won't they?"

Trapper could feel his heart beating in his throat. He wanted to reach out to her, but he didn't know what the rules were on touching, hugging, comforting. He still didn't get this free love thing, or if there were rules. If they were supposed to make it up as they went along, he wasn't sure if this was a good time to improvise.

"Do you think that's a possibility?" Trapper said.

"It is if the idiots who run this place drop the acid and think the trip is groovy," Lena said. "Don't you know how intoxicating pretty ideals are?"

Trapper watched Hawkeye, who sat down cross-legged on the floor beside Lena. She let him move close. Trapper desperately wished he had words for this situation. He was a veteran, but not of a whole war-ridden childhood.

"Everything could change," Lena said to her leatherwork. "Don't you understand how that scares me? I've had enough changes. I like my life. I have my children, my - my you, and Jeremiah has his fathers. Do you understand that _they took those women's children away?_" Lena's voice rose to a peak.

Hawkeye wrapped his arms around Lena, pulling her into the circle of his body, and held her as she shook. Trapper slid out of the stupid beanbag chair and moved beside her. He took the plunge and patted her back in a manner he hoped was reassuring. He wanted her to know she wasn't alone, it wasn't even just her and Hawkeye.

"Lena?" Jeremiah looked up from his homework.

Hawkeye knee-walked over to the kid and pulled him into a hug. Jeremiah put his head on Hawkeye's shoulder and hung onto his neck, feet coming around Hawkeye's waist like a littler kid than he was. Lena put her head on Trapper's shoulder, so he pulled her closer and said nice things in her ear.

"It's okay, kiddo," Hawkeye said. "Your mom is worried about someone else. Do you want to go show Grandma Pearl your homework?"

Jeremiah nodded. "I saw her in the sewing room."

"She is, it's right next door," Hawkeye called after him even as he took off.

"I know!"

Trapper kissed Lena's temple. She was putting up a strong front, but clearly terrified. He grasped that this was more than over some new group coming to town, but couldn't begin to fathom the well of fear someone like Lena must draw from. Hawkeye gently took the awl from her and set it down.

"There are laws in this country," Trapper said. "I know people, lawyers, even a congressman. You are not, I repeat. Not. Going to lose your children."

"I'm sorry," Lena said. She wiped hastily at her eyes.

Hawkeye took her hand, holding it in both of his. "Listen. We'll go away from here if it comes to that. But Trapper needs our help. His daughter Becky is with those wackos."

Lena's hand went to her mouth. "Oh! - oh my goodness. How? Your little girl?"

"She's not so little," Trapper said.

"She got into trouble," Hawkeye euphemized and summarized. "We guess she just fell in with them."

"I saw her at the lake when they all just rolled in," Trapper said.

"Like a storm cloud," Hawkeye added. "Trap, there's a subject I hate to bring up. . . ."

Trapper sighed. Well, Lena deserved to know. "Becky claimed to be pregnant about eighteen months ago, but we don't know what happened after that. There's no baby. I haven't seen her in over a year, and then she shows up here. I'd sure like an explanation."

Lena looked at him, horrified. "Oh, Trapper, you don't think she could -"

"She wouldn't," Hawkeye said.

"We don't even know if she was really pregnant," Trapper said. "Or maybe she, you know, she lost it, didn't have it. Who knows when she took up with these yahoos."

"But you're sure you saw her?" Lena said.

"I didn't imagine it. She looked up and saw me, I'm sure of it," Trapper said. "But it was like she looked right through me."

Lena shoved her calligraphy papers into boxes. "Maybe the women won't talk to men. The article from the Robinsons said the men controlled the women completely."

"These people are starting to become my least favorite cult," Trapper said.

"We'll make it better," Hawkeye said. "We always do."

"Of course we will." Lena stopped. "How?"

Hawkeye, sitting between them, took Lena and Trapper's hands in his. Trapper's gaze flicked nervously at Lena, then back at Hawkeye, who was giving them a battle-weary smile. Trapper almost felt like a shoe was waiting to drop, like this couldn't be for keeps. Adultery he knew; he was so good at it. But Lena was giving them both watery smiles. She leaned over and kissed Hawkeye. Trapper watched helplessly, hating how right they looked together. But then Hawkeye turned his head, and before Trapper could process the moment in his mind, Hawkeye was kissing him.

Lena climbed over Hawkeye and, with a glance of permission, landed delicately in Trapper's lap. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her forehead to his chest. He held her in a great bear hug and kissed the same spot on her hairline that Hawk had kissed this morning. She seemed smaller than the first time he saw her. Pocket-sized. Something dear he'd like to protect, almost like a little sister but moreso that distant cousin you have a low grade attraction to. He'd learned so much about the world in just two days.

"I'm so glad you came," Lena said. "All things considered."

Trapper laughed. Hawkeye grinned at him over her blonde head.

"I'm glad you think so highly of me, sweetheart," Trapper said.

Lena stretched her legs out into Hawkeye's lap. He leaned back against the wall and rested his hands on her bare legs.

"I'm afraid for my kids," Lena said.

Trapper rocked her ever so slightly. "You shouldn't. We're white hats. We get the bad guys and have the happy ending."

"Look," Hawkeye said in his action-voice, "what are we doing sitting here going on just the word of a few reporters when we've got living witnesses? I don't know if you're aware of this, but reporters sometimes write things not just to tell a story, but to _sell it_."

"That Bear guy was a pretty big creep," Lena said.

"The brass at the top are always creeps," Hawkeye said.

"Comes with the territory," Trapper said. "Get some people under you, you get to liking the feeling of your boots squashing the guys you stepped on to get there."

"You two didn't meet him . . ."

Hawkeye tapped her arm to pontificate. "Well, what about the women? Has anyone even talked to them?"

"I don't know," Lena said.

Hawk was having an Idea. Trapper could see the little bulb lighting up his eyes. "Look, there's no point in trying to convince the boys tripping balls down in the longhouse. Why don't you take the girls and go stage a feminist intervention?"

"And drag my Becky out of there by her hair, if necessary," Trapper put in.

Lena nudged him. "If your daughter is over eighteen, she's free to make her own mistakes."

"She's nineteen."

"Horrid age." Lena stood, leaning on their shoulders for support. "All right, gentlemen. I'll gather the troops."

Hawkeye popped up and mock-saluted. "That's my girl."

Lena led them to the ladder. "Meanwhile, ah, do you boys have plans?"

"No, why?" Hawkeye said. Trapper eyed them both suspiciously. He'd never felt so handled as when he'd fallen in with these two.

"Well, dear heart, have you shown Trapper our new shower and water heater?"

Hawkeye wrapped an arm around her waist. "Miss Klein, I believe you are trying to have me seduced."

Lena and Trapper waited while Hawkeye went down the ladder. "No, I'm hinting that you both smell like fish."

"Ah," Hawkeye said from the floor level.

"There's running water in this thatchpatch?" Trapper said.

What he meant was, is it a private trickle for two?  
~*~


	10. Chapter 10

Title: "Marigold Wine"  
Author: Aura218/Kristi  
Pairing: Hawkeye/Trapper, Hawkeye/others  
Genre: Drama, romance, longfic, postseries, 60s  
Summary: In the 60s, Trapper visits his old army buddy at a hippie commune, where Hawkeye has retreated to find peace.

Part 10

They didn't go straight to the showers like Hawkeye promised. They knocked on the door of the longhouse and politely asked to see what all the fun was they were missing. They smiled while they said it. The white Indian with a too-sober expression told them "we don't trust anyone over thirty."

Trapper didn't take it well.

Storm clouds were brewing in the north as they walked up to Hawkeye's cabin. Shadows were growing long and a cool breeze was picking up. As Trapper and Hawkeye up the hill, depressed and pensive, they passed the Robinsons riding down on bicycles. They both wore camper's backpacks that each looked heavier than their frail frames.

"Toodooledoo, boys!" Mrs. Robinson called. "We're getting while the getting's good."

"We're too old for this," Mr. Robinson said. "Sergeant Robinson is disembarking, sir!'"

Hawkeye tossed off perhaps the closest thing to a real salute Trapper had ever seen him give.

"We owe them for the early warning," Trapper said.

"Now who'll make the marigold wine?" Hawkeye was genuinely distressed.

Trapper patted his shoulder.

When they got to Hawkeye's cabin, the clouds obscuring the sun had turned the place dark inside. Fresh air blew in, whipping up the curtains. The cabin smelled fresh as spring, all the smoky fire smell cleared out.

In the dim light, they kept their backs to each other as they stripped down and collected their shower things, as if they were keeping themselves apart for some bridal meeting - in a camp shower, of all places. Trapper was feeling the anticipation, and knew Hawkeye was too.

He pondered, as he followed Hawkeye's towel-wrapped rear end up the hill, wasn't this a bit of a fantasy fulfiller? How many times had he showered with Hawkeye in that cruddy army tent? How many times could he have just walked through that swinging dividing door, pinned Hawkeye up against the opposite stall and - well. How much could you do in a cement-bottomed stall in rubber thong sandals?

Guess I'll find out, he thought.

The showers was a tall, wood lean-to that drained into a creek. The water was collected into a tower and fed into a hot water heater contained inside the lean-to, powered by a gas generator. The gas was paid for communally, on the honor system. A jar and a strongly-worded note was bracketed to the inside wall. Trapper shrugged and contributed a dollar fifty for the whole gas tank. It seemed like a fair trade for bliss.

While Hawkeye fiddled with the switches, Trapper stacked their shampoo bottles and things on the shelf inside the shower. It was a good six foot square in there, with a nice sized bench. He could work with this. The generator burbled to life.

"It'll take a few minutes to get going," Hawkeye said behind him.

Trapper jumped.

"Nervous?" Hawkeye's warm hand smoothed over his back.

"Naw. Well. We're new together." He looked down, twisting the lid on the last bottle from Hawk's bag. Massage oil, Dr. Pierce? Trapper thought, reading the label. Aren't we hopeful.

Hawkeye linked his arms over the chest-high shower wall, catching Trapper reading the bottle. He smiled, looking devilishly intent and not a bit ashamed. Trapper set the bottle down.

"Get in here," Trapper said.

Hawkeye balled up his towel and tossed it onto a metal chair in the corner. Trapper grinned, doing the same with his own. Hawkeye slipped his slender self through the door and pulled Trapper against him. They came together, kissing with the force of a whole day of abstinence.

"We can't take too long -" Hawkeye whispered.

"I know. Getting dark . . ." Trapper lost his breath as Hawkeye kissed a line down his throat.

Hands were everywhere. Last night, it was too quick, he couldn't see Hawkeye in the dark and there were blankets and clothing in the way. But now Hawkeye was limned in late afternoon sunlight through the vented high window and Trapper could take in all of him, standing before him, just waiting to be explored. Trapper held on to the shower wall on either side of Hawkeye and kissed his way from one nipple to the other, dipping down low over his belly. He discovered that three centimeters south-east of Hawkeye's second floating rib was very good for nibbling.

Meanwhile, Trapper heard a groan of pipes and water, and a spray of icy water hit him. He gasped and jumped into Hawkeye's arms for the body heat. Hawkeye laughed.

"Do excuse me, Miss, I believe you're standing in my skin."

"Yeah, you'll find me in your _skin_," Trapper muttered against his lips. He couldn't resist digging his finger's in Hawkeye's hair. The man had the most delicious nape of neck ever.

Hawkeye ran his hands down Trapper's wet back. "Really?

"Hm?"

Hawkeye reached around Trapper's hip to twist with the taps. "Back up," he said.

Trapper stepped into the stream and let Hawkeye tilt his head back, warm water running from the top of his weary scalp to his tense back muscles, to the muscles in his legs that ached from all the hiking he'd done in the past two days. He knew Hawkeye was watching him and liked that he was being watched. It felt good to know someone thought he was still pornographic at his age.

Hawkeye ran the soap over him, starting at the top and working his way down, running his hands over all the muscles and divots. He spent quite a bit of time on his lowers, until Trapper was keening low in his throat. When Hawkeye stopped, Trapper protested.

"I have bigger plans for that," Hawkeye said, bobbing Trapper's cock with his fingertip.

"Tease," Trapper said.

Very much wanting more of this soap-groping, Trapper turned around. Hawkeye did him all over again, stem to stern. Trapper gave pause when Hawkeye's hands went more aft than anyone's hands had before, at least in a recreational way.

"This okay?" Hawkeye lips whispered hot air over Trapper's ear.

"Yeah." Nerves quivered down Trapper's back. It wasn't entirely a bad feeling.

Hawkeye didn't stop, his soapy hands now slowly working their way between Trapper's ass cheeks.

"I don't want you to feel scared or in pain," Hawkeye said.

Trapper couldn't look at him. "Do you like it? That done to you?"

Hawkeye's laugh was breathy on the side of Trapper's neck. "Yeah. I do."

That hand was now massaging in slow circles down there, not penetrating. Trapper couldn't get over the idea that someone was touching him in a place he'd never thought he'd let anyone touch him like that. It was shocking. It wasn't what nice boys did. It was really hot. Hawkeye's other hand was around his waist, holding him steady against his shoulder.

"Maybe . . ." Trapper swallowed. He glanced at Hawkeye's jutting cock, at the utter impossibility of _that_ in _him_. "Maybe just what you're doing. Except, you know. More."

Hawkeye made noises like he was trying hard not to come laughing. "Never let it be said that you aren't up for new experiences."

Trapper folded his arms on the shower wall and dropped his forehead against them. What had he agreed to? Hawkeye was rinsing the soap off his hands and going for the massage oil. Oh, lord. Trapper thought he knew what to expect, he'd had the requisite prostate exams in the service, but this would be different, turned on like this with another guy. He realized he was losing his virginity again at the fresh age of 4x.

Hawkeye's left hand ran down Trapper's stomach, stopping low on his belly. Trapper turned to catch his eye and was met with a surprisingly concerned expression. He'd expected debauched glee.

"Are you sure?" Hawkeye said.

Trapper nodded.

Hawkeye kissed Trapper's shoulder. "Tell me if you want to stop."

The only weirdness was when Hawkeye first touched him. Trapper felt his skin jump a little; the oil was colder than Hawkeye's hand. Hawkeye's free hand roamed over his chest again. Trapper took a deep breath and willed himself to relax, to banish every snide backroom joke he'd ever heard about this, because the guys who told fag jokes? Had never been here with Hawkeye, never been touched like this, never loved their best friend and trusted him so much. He wanted this. Hawkeye's finger swirled around back there again, relaxing him and getting him ready for more. Trapper's breath caught in his throat. What -

"Still good?" Hawkeye said.

"Yes please."

Pleasant little tendrils radiated out from his pelvis, down his legs and up his spine. It felt good. Hawkeye slowly easing his finger in, making deeper circles that seemed to send express messages directly to Trapper's brain, and from there, every little cell in his body. Trapper had never thought a prostate exam was the worst thing in the world, but it had never felt this _sexual_.

Hawkeye's finger was now knuckles-deep inside him, and Trapper was hanging on to the shower wall for fear he'd pass out. The blood was actually running out of his head. Then Hawkeye moved his hand and Trapper saw stars.

"What. Was that?" Trapper said when he came back down from space.

Hawkeye hugged him around the belly. "Welcome to the proper use of your prostate, Captain McIntyre."

"I think you just proved the existence of the G-spot in men."

Hawkeye snickered. "I would have accosted you in the supply tent ten years ago if I knew I'd be doing such a mitzvah."

"Wait," Trapper said. He pivoted oh his heels and bent over the bench, taking Hawkeye and his hand with him. Hawkeye snuffled a giggle. Trapper's inhibitions were depleting rapidly, anything to keep that feeling going. Whatever 'hangups' (Hawkeye's new favorite word) he had had about anal sex, he was seeing them revealed as so much macho posturing. Hell, when he was thirteen, his father had tacked on to the sex talk, "and don't ever let me hear you played the girl." This felt good, he trusted Hawkeye, and people like his old man just didn't have any idea.

With his legs spread, Hawkeye had more access. Another finger was pressed inside him and Hawkeye began slowly thrusting. Trapper couldn't really feel the specific motions Hawkeye's fingers were making, just that it was a lot of pressure and it all hit the right notes. Every time, Hawk hit that spot deep inside him, which was like a button that brought his orgasm closer and closer. Meanwhile, the fabulous little sensations he'd first felt continued, egging him on.

He was close. Hawkeye's hand came around his hips, but Trapper grabbed it.

"Wait," Trapper said, at the same time Hawkeye said, "What?"

"I want -" Trapper took a breath. Did he? He leaned on the wall and twisted around to look at Hawkeye. He couldn't say it, but Hawkeye understood.

Hawkeye's fingers pulled out of his body. "Are you sure? I wanted a little more for your first time than a piddly camp shower. I planned romantic candlelight and some poetic begging."

Trapper stood up straight. He hugged Hawkeye close to him. "You make me feel so good," he said.

They stood there kissing in the pissing down warm water while the first thunder claps rumbled in the distance. This little shower stall was shelter on a stormy island, just the two of them. Tomorrow, Trapper would have to go out and face the world. He wanted Hawkeye, completely, just in case life happened out there.

Trapper picked up the bottle of massage oil. He poured a generous amount into his palm while Hawkeye watched, licking his lips. Hawkeye's damp eyelashes fluttered on his cheeks as Trapper smoothed the thick liquid over Hawkeye's cock. Those too-bright blue eyes opened, a goofy smile coming across Hawkeye's lips. Trapper caught Hawkeye's earlobe between his teeth and whispered in his ear.

"I want you to fuck me."

Trapper turned around slowly. All his joints felt loose, his arms floppy. He remembered a point in his life when he felt like this all the time - confident, sexy, electrified in his skin. He flipped his hair out of his eyes, remembered it blonde.

Trapper took his spot over the bench again. He felt Hawkeye come up behind him and hold him by the hips. Trapper felt skin brush his backside, and a little thread of panic wove in his stomach. He pushed it away. He was ready. He felt the stretch. It hurt a little - not as much as he expected. It felt strange, a lot of pressure, not exactly like sex. He shifted, spread his legs a little more. He discovered he could adjust how things fit by how he moved his body. It felt better if he arched his back as Hawkeye thrust in slowly.

Trapper was concentrating on how good he could make it feel when Hawkeye stopped.

"Are you okay?" Hawkeye said.

"Don't stop," Trapper said.

"You can tell me if you want to stop."

"I know," Trapper said, exasperated. "I'm waiting for you to get on with it."

Hawkeye thrust again, and Trapper realized they were totally joined when he felt his ass pressed against the curve of Hawkeye's hipbones. He moaned, closing his eyes and letting it all wash over him. He was getting used to the sensation. It was mostly good, probably thanks to all that foreplay, and what wasn't good was quickly getting washed away by the very, very good parts. He wanted Hawkeye to move and maybe hit that spot, could he do that?

Hawkeye took Trapper's hips in both hands and rocked. Trapper gasped. The spot. The wonderful, delicious spot. Hawkeye hit it again.

"Ohhh, God, keep doing that," Trapper hissed into his own shoulder.

Hawkeye got into a rhythm, back and forth, hitting the spot almost every time. Trapper moaned. Tendrils of heat were working up through his stomach. He was actually hard, shocking given what was causing it. Trapper could hear Hawkeye getting worked up, could feel his fingers digging into his hips. He was gaining speed but holding back, which Trapper thanked him very much for, because he sensed that it wouldn't take much change in movement to turn this from pleasure to pain.

Hawkeye was getting closer. He wrapped his arms around Trapper and one hand came down to Trapper's cock. He supposed he could come like this - ohhh. Yes. If Hawkeye touched him _there_ and did _that _inside him with every thrust . . .

Trapper came first, hips twitching and spurting on the bench. Hawkeye followed seconds later, thrusting deeper inside him. I caused that, Trapper thought. Me, my body, he wants me. Hawkeye thrusting and swearing and holding onto him for dear life. Hawkeye, thinking something rather similar, congratulated himself on a successful deflowering of a Trapper John. Trapper gasped his breath back, holding onto the bench, belatedly felt several muscle groups protest the position.

Hawkeye thumped down on the bench beside Trapper, who was still collecting himself. Trapper, catching his breath, almost dropped down onto the bench, winced, and sat on Hawkeye instead. A softer cushion. He dropped his head on Hawkeye's shoulder, willing the blood to come back to his uppers. Hawkeye kissed his temple, head tilted back, bony chest heaving. Trapper dangled his arms around Hawkeye's shoulders.

"I didn't think it would be like that," Trapper said.

Hawkeye smiled. "Then I'm glad it was."

"Think maybe we could take a shower now?"

* * *

"This is ridiculous." Lena flung her calligraphy pen at the wall. It splattered a pattern one of the art girls would probably expand into a mural later. Even your accidents in this place could grow into something pretty.

The Exa-bums had been here overnight and into the morning and she was still cowering in the attic like Mr. Rochester's broken wife, too scared to take on the world with the whole of her person. So these idiots didn't listen to women? Was she going to let them reduce her to the parts of her sum? Well, she would make them listen. She was a mother. She would call on the power of Sacajawea, Calamity Jane, and Betty Friedan.

Somehow. Picking her way through the house to the front porch, Lena's resolve fluctuated. How could she break into their in-group if they wouldn't even speak with her?

What would Hawkeye do?

Break in, cause a disaster, and leave someone else to clean up the pieces. She couldn't be Hawkeye. She couldn't be a man. She had to do this like a woman.

Bethany, Alera, and the other college girls were lounging on the front porch. Kids and their artist moms weren't to be seen.

"We made oatmeal yogurt for breakfast," Bethany said. She'd braided her long, long hair and looped it up, indicating she'd done an honest piece of work today.

"We brought it up to the field by the berry bushes for the kids," Alera said, poofing her Natural with her fingers. "All the kids know where it is, but the new people don't."

"Clever girl," Lena said.

"The guys haven't slept," Alera said. "They've been up all night talking and playing records and doing mushrooms. We took turns at watch."

"Are you sure?" Lena said. "Siva too?"

Alera nodded. Lena folded her arms.

"So what now, boss?" Bethany said.

Lena blinked. They were staring at her. "Me?"

"We need them out, right?" Alera said.

"This place is for everyone," said a girl in shorts and a floppy sun hat - Skylark. One of the art girls, friends with Pandora.

"It's for everyone who upholds our ideals," Alera said.

"What are those, exactly?" Bethany said.

"Love," Skylark said.

"Is it love to separate a mother from her child?" Lena said.

"Of course not," Skylark said, "but if that's their culture, who are we -"

"Do you think the mothers chose that culture?" Alera said sharply. "Hell no. It's that crazy old voodoo guy who's calling the shots."

"So what can we do about it?" Bethany said. "Those guys won't listen to a bunch of girls."

"So who says we have to listen to them?" Lena said. "I believe the American expression you tell your children is, 'ignore him and he will go away.'"

"What's the plan, sam?" Alera said.

"Have his women had breakfast this morning? Are their children fed?"

Bethany and Alera surveyed their troops. "I don't think anyone asked. I mean, we're not supposed to talk to them."

"Says who?" Lena said.

"Bear - ohhh." Bethany said.

"Let's go," Alera said.

"Where?" Skylark said.

"To the kitchen!" Bethany crowed their battle cry.

* * *

"This is so degrading," Alera said.

Behind her, Lena could hear the girl huffing as she tromped up the path with the heavy coffee urn. A long line of some ten women followed them, carrying baskets, platters, casserole dishes, and net bags.

"We're helping," Bethany said, two women behind Lena.

"We're doing what needs to get done," Lena said. "During the war, this was how the women made a difference. In America, they went into the factories to do the men's jobs. Don't you think your Rosie the Riveter was a feminist?"

Alera grunted.

"Feminism isn't about only about shouting at the men," Lena said. "It's about hard work. You do the job that's needed and you can see your influence at the end, that's how you get respect from men and respect for yourself. During the war, we proved we could do their jobs. Then they tried to send us back into the kitchens."

"And we said, 'hell no, we won't go,'" Bethany said.

"Please, child," Alera said.

Lena laughed.

The trees opened up to the clearing at the rocky beach. The sounds of children shouting and splashing rang up. The group of women and children were some hundred yards up the beach. Tents had been set up.

"Do we just walk into their camp?" Alera said.

The women had set up camp. It was their home, at least for now.

"No," Lena said. "You two, have everyone set up the food here. I'm going to find someone to talk to over there."

Lena could feel eyes on her as she approached the half hazard camp. Women washing clothes at the shore watched her approach. The rocky bank that made a natural dock was waist-high off the water closer to their encampment. It could seem more natural to walk up to them in the water. Self-conscious, Lena casually walked to the water's edge and lowered her feet to the rocky bottom of the cool lake. See? she thought. I'm just like you. . . . Seafaring.

This is idiotic.

Lena kicked herself up onto the rock. But somehow, her arms' strength failed her. Her hips didn't clear the rock. Her legs flailed as her body hovered in the space between rock and sea. She glanced about for help, but her own girls were too far away, watching on in horror. With utter dread and embarrassment, Lena felt rock crumble under the palms and -

Lena fell into the lake.

She came up gasping. The water was _cold!_ She was drenched, scalp to underpants. Tendrils of icy water were seeping into her bra. And her girls were laughing at her. Lena was aware she carried a sort of European, blonde dignity. Now it was dripping off her into the brackish lake.

"Take my hand," said a voice behind her.

Lena turned. Two of the women from the encampment were kneeling on the rock, holding their hands out to her. Trying not to make a big deal out of it, Lena let them help her onto shore.

"Are you okay?" one of them asked. She had long, strawberry hair that fell in waves down her back. A pendant around her neck glittered in the sun.

"Everything but my pride," Lena said.

"And your leg," the other said, a petite, rounded girl with pigtails.

"Hm?" Lena looked, and then she felt the pain. A ribbon of blood ran from a hole in the back of her thigh. "Oh!" she cried. She kicked off her shoes so the blood didn't run into them.

"I'll go get Naomi." The petite girl dashed off to the woods.

"That girl," the redhead said with a sigh. "Can you walk?"

Lena tested her weight. "Yes, I think so. Are you allowed to talk to me?"

The girl peered at her. Lena guessed her age around twenty. "Of course we can. Are you coming?"

The cult had medical supplies. Clean gauze in paper wrappers and bottles of peroxide. Aspirin tablets and filtered water in hiker's canteens.

"What's all that?" the long-haired girl indicated Lena's troupe, watching her awkwardly from the beach and listening to Bethany with Alera bicker over putting the colds in the lake to chill.

"We, ah." Lena stood and gave the small group who had bothered to notice her existence a broad smile. "We brought you breakfast."

The girl smiled. She had that look of freckle-faced competence to her, like a teacher or a nurse. She announced to the women around her, "Isn't that nice, ladies? Breakfast for those who are hungry!"

Most of the kids and a few of their mothers left their work to explore the spread. To Lena's approval, Bethany and Alera welcomed the women warmly, if overly so. Maybe they were actually making a connection.

"You already ate?" Lena said.

"A little after dawn," the girl said. "But the kids get snacky around now. I'm Becca, by the way."

Lena took her hand. "Becca . . . McIntyre?"

"Yeah?" she said.

Lena blinked in the sunlight. "Can we talk?"


	11. Chapter 11

Title: "Marigold Wine" part 11/?  
Author:  
Pairing: Hawkeye/Trapper, Hawkeye/others  
Genre: Drama, romance, longfic, postseries, 60s  
Summary: In the 60s, Trapper visits his old army buddy at a hippie commune, where Hawkeye has retreated to find peace.  
Rating: R/M

Read: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7| Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10

Part 11

Trapper sat on the sofa in front of the fireplace drinking his coffee, watching Hawkeye, lost in thought. Strange, strange morning. On one hand, he was worried about Becky. On the other, he felt like he could sprout wings and fly up to the tops of those swaying oaks out back.

"Did you hear that storm all night?" Hawkeye said.

"Hm?" Trapper said.

Hawkeye sat beside him on the sofa, sending up clouds of ash, and dropped his legs in Trapper's lap. The warmth seemed to spread to improbable square inches from point of contact.

"You all right?" Hawkeye said.

Trapper fanned his face with one of the flatter pillows. Affecting Vivian Leigh, he drawled, "Oh, kind sah, I do believe yuv tahken mah maidenhood!"

"Rat." Hawkeye chuffed him on the side of the neck, lingering fingers stroking his throat.

"Did I mangle your mind?" Trapper grinned at him over his mug.

"Always." Hawkeye sat up so they could kiss.

Hawkeye drank his coffee left-handed while he pulled Trapper closer to him with his right. They took a moment. Trapper was happy. Absurdly so. Happier than he'd been in months, years even, since the divorce and the dark times before. He thought he'd become the kind of guy who couldn't have any relationship that lasted longer than scrambled eggs the morning after. This was a terrible idea, getting swept up from one night of good sex. One long night. They hadn't come back to the cabin to _sleep_, after all.

Near midnight, when they were spent from each other, they'd smoked a joint and eaten peanut butter and blackberry sandwiches. Trapper told Hawkeye about a guy he'd spent a little too much time with in med school, which Hawkeye had already guessed at in generalities. Trapper had no idea there was any way, back in the _fifties_ for god's sake, that Hawkeye had recognized that Trapper had the potential to go that way. Hawkeye asked him, "So what are you?" and Trapper didn't have a word for what he was calling himself - gay, bisexual, straight. Those words were like wearing someone else's clothes. He was divorced, he was involved with his best friend, he had a complicated past. He was who he was and anything more would be someone else's ideas, not his own.

While they laid back and listened to the far-off rumbling, Trapper asked Hawkeye when he'd gone off-road exploring himself, in the romantic sense. Hawk was an unsurprisingly advanced youth - fifteen, with friends he met in New York when he was sent to his Jewish aunts on his mother's side. He spent the summer going to jazz clubs in the Village, flashing his fake ID. He was supposed to be taking classes at The New School, but didn't learn a single thing. ("Except which free clinic would cure your anal warts without a psych eval." "Really?" "Dad was so proud.")

They made love a second time. This time it was slow, soft pillows, rainstorm and shadowy candlelight on Hawkeye's golden skin as Trapper kissed down his spine. Cracks of lightning outlining the raindrops on the sheets and each other as they kissed. Hawkeye's legs cradling Trapper's waist as they rocked together, whispering lovers' nonsense.

Trouble. Hawkeye had a history of disaster. Ever since Missy Mushroom's Geisha House, where Trapper played Go with a male geisha on his lap and stifled the urge to say yes to the propositions the pretty girl with a hard-on was whispering in his ear, while Hawkeye took his 'lady' of the evening into the back rooms.

Trouble tasted like coffee as the morning sun burned the mist from the trees. Trapper kissed a line to the spot behind Hawkeye's ear and sucked. Hawk hissed. There were words in the back of his mind begging to be let to the tip of his tongue. Words he knew were plain stupid to even think right now. Idiotic, schmoopy three little words.

"We need to go," Hawkeye said.

"Hm?" Trapper said into his throat.

"Becca. Lena."

"Never met 'em."

Hawkeye's hands pulled at his hair. Trapper smiled and continued despite duress.

"Darling, as much as your tongue in my ear is tuning my central nervous system like a violin . . ."

Trapper sighed and sat back. Hawkeye didn't look all that keen to leave the sofa, either. Life was happening already.

"She's your daughter. What do you want to do?" Hawkeye said.

Trapper scrubbed at his face. He could use a shave. "Walk out that door? See what happens next?"

Hawkeye held his hand as they did just that.

* * *

There was a time, Trapper thought, when manipulating the establishment to bend to their will was second nature to he and Hawkeye. They didn't always get their way, but they usually made _something_ happen. A deposed general, a humiliated Frank, a better industrial popcorn popper. What was a bunch of kids looped out on mushrooms compared to the United States Army?

Hawkeye and Trapper set their feets in motion to the last place they saw Bear. If he was keeping something over the women, maybe he could be convinced to order Becky to leave the group, if requested to do so by her father. At least, that was Trapper's best guess. Nothing about this Exin- Excu - ECB, let's call them for short - group made any sense.

"They're like Marines," Hawkeye said abruptly.

Trapper looked up from the sloped path and nearly fell in a muddy hole. "Come again?"

Hawkeye ducked away from a low hanging branch and got spritzed anyway. "The women who go through these 'reparenting' rituals. Y'know, 'one two three four, I love the Marine Corps.'"

"Brainwashed," Trapper said.

"Those guys kill themselves for fun."

"The more they punish themselves, the less they want to leave," Trapper said.

"Boo yah," Hawkeye said without feeling.

"Do you ever go to the veterans' events?" Trapper said.

Hawkeye kicked a rock. They both watched it skitter, knock into other rocks and send them rolling down the hill. "No. Only one - the first year."

Any soldier's first year home was an event unto itself. They all had narratives about the months in the dead time between landing and their first anniversary, especially the guys who also celebrate their Live Day, the day they didn't die. The adjustments, the allowances others made for them, the hours they spent not sleeping. Do you move past it? Are you a different man after a year? Of course not. You're always you, no matter where you go.

"I had to go to the V.A. for psychiatry," Hawkeye admitted.

Trapper glanced at him. Hawkeye was looking at the road ahead.

"I used to go to the beef and ales on Thursdays just to have someone to talk to," Trapper said. "Louise sometimes went along, but I liked it better when she stayed home. I wanted to see people who were, you know . . ." He waved his arm in the air, trying to talk with gestures.

"Real people."

"Yeah."

Hawkeye reached out and took Trapper's hand. Surprised, Trapper squeezed it. Something zinged between them, down their arms and across their connected hands and up into their hearts and minds. Hawkeye met Trapper's eyes. They stopped walking and stood there a moment. The air smelled like mud and rain. A branch bent under the weight of rainwater and the drips clattered down the forest like shell fragments. Hawkeye twined their fingers together and pulled him close. Trapper kissed him. Hawkeye was trembling against him.

"C'mon," Trapper said.

They kept moving.

* * *

"We go from camp to camp to swap knowledge and learn what we can from the people we meet, and to teach them our ways," Becca said. "Knowledge is as valuable as food or medicine, you know? We should all be embracing a barter economy if we want to keep our communes going. How many communes have failed because they didn't know how to irrigate their crops, or manage their families?"

Lena nodded as she shook the stones out of a colander of black beans someone had thrust into her hands. It seemed if you stepped into the women's camp, you were put to work.

Becca twisted another tuft of plant fiber around her spindle. "I've only been here a year, but Bear says I really get where it's at. See those tents? I bartered them for a few spools of yarn. Isn't that silly? They needed blankets more than the tents. I also manage the women's group, well, not as a leader, since we're a socialist cooperative. More like a spokeswoman. I tell Bear what goes on here so he can make the best decisions for the whole group."

Becca was a natural saleswoman. Her only failing was that she was so sure of her product, she didn't notice when she was failing to convince her audience as well as she had convinced herself.

"And does he?" Lena said.

Becca looked up, surprised to be interrupted. "Yes. Of course he does."

Lena looked at the other women around the campfire. Two were spinning, a few were braiding a child's hair or minding a baby, one was stirring something in a pot of black water that didn't smell like food. None of them met her eye.

"Always?" Lena asked.

Becca's smile looked fragile. "When he can. He has a lot of responsibilities."

Lena said in her best nonaccusatory tone, "Of course he does. You know, I've heard quite a lot about you from your father," Lena said.

Becca's fingers twitched on her spinning, but her face remained neutral. "How do you know my father?"

"He's my husband's friend. He's very worried about you."

"Who's your husband - it isn't Hawkeye, is it?

Lena blinked. "I -"

Becca laughed. "It is! Wow, no kidding, old home week. Hawkeye's a blast! I remember him - when I was a kid, he came to the house. They were like Frick and Frack in the war, did they tell you? God, Korea, it wasn't even like a war, not like our war over in Vietnam."

Lena set down the colander of beans. "He very much wants to speak with you."

Becca couldn't seem to get her next mess of plant fiber started on the spindle hook. Her fingers spun the handle in short, jerky movements. "He's here? What's he doing, following me?"

"Lena?" Bethany appeared at her elbow, holding a Tupperware cake cover upside-down by the handle, half filled with rice and beans. Alera, beside her, toted a terra cotta bowl of the plum sauce.

"Hi." Becca dropped her spinning into her lap. "Do you girls need something?"

Alera pointed to the Coleman tents near the treeline. "Are those the tents where the women in solitary are staying?"

Becca looked them over. "Solitude. They're meditating. Who said?"

Bethany tucked her hair behind her ear. "I dunno, that woman over there? She said there's women who just, um, did some ritual thing? And we could bring them rice and beans?"

Lena watched Becca deliberate a half second while her welcoming smile twitched. "Thanks! Just leave it by the door if they don't answer."

There are times when one can't define the sort of unease they feel about a new person. Sometimes that 'something's wrong' feeling comes on quickly - as with a man who's undressing one with his eyes - while other times it takes observation to discern what brand of unpredictable or untrustworthy that person may be. Lena didn't like to criticize confidence in a young woman, but confidence was a world away from arrogance or manipulation. To say nothing of outright lying.

Lena watched Becca watch Alera and Bethany walk to the Coleman tents. "So . . . I met Bear."

Becca smiled. "Isn't he wonderful?"

"He . . . leaves an impression."

Becca rolled her fibers between her palms. "He's taught me so much. I mean, it scares me sometimes how far ahead of me he is, spiritually."

Becca had a crush. Her adoration was effusive as she went on about Bear's intelligence, his years of international study and travel, his connections to well known holy men. Lena could feel her heart sinking as she watched all the tell-tale signs of a young girl sunk deep into a sinkhole of love with a man who couldn't possibly feel half the care she felt for him. The very thought of that . . . that _hippie_ making time with this fresh, bright-eyed kid made Lena want to dress Becca head to toe in a nun's habit and ship her to a mountaintop in France.

"I dropped out of college because Bear says it only teaches you what to think about, not how to think." Becca added, "He doesn't force us to do anything."

"I didn't say he did," Lena said.

Becca didn't mention any baby of her own. Lena didn't know how to ask. She got the distinct impression that Becca and Bear weren't sleeping together, but she couldn't be sure.

Becca was looking past them, at the Coleman tents where Alera was having an intense-looking discussion with a woman who sat just inside the tent.

"Becca, how old are you?" Lena said.

"Twenty-one. Well, okay, I think I can be honest with you because you've been so great. I'm really nineteen, but Bear says I have an old soul."

"Oh?" Lena said.

"I really do. You wouldn't believe all the stuff I've been through."

Lena smiled politely.

She hated children. Not all: overly grown children. She'd rather teach an eight year old who was eager to learn than a nineteen year old who'd seen it all.

"Your people really shouldn't be talking to women in seclusion." Becca was looking at Alera and Bethany.

Lena turned. Bethany was sitting on the rocks beside the unzipped mouth of a tent, in which a woman appeared to be hiding her tears. Lena could call Alera and Bethany over and they would come, despite not being her students. And then her group would return to the women's barn, and Becca's group would go about its daily business.

"Did you hear me?" Becca said, anger growing.

Lena's heart jumped. She gathered that Becca was used to having her preferences given precedent.

"They're not 'my' people," Lena said. "I live with them, not control them."

Becca whirled on Alera and Bethany. "A pip," that was what Hawkeye would call her. Lena had never met a real 'pip', but she gathered that it was noisy and young. The other women at the firepit didn't interfere with Becca. One took her child to another bench to finish her hair. Lena noticed that the woman and child were dissimilar by physical appearance, and wondered if they had a similar relationship that she and Jeremiah had.

Bethany and Alera moved fast when Becca came at them, stomping across the beach and demanding explanations. Becca knew how to be the queen in girl world - she didn't order, she made other women feel small and stupid, the way a man's world subconsciously made young women feel all the time. Lena would be intimidated by Becca if she was Bethany and Alera's age and thought that a woman's confidence was as difficult to cultivate as flowers from a mountainside.

Lena caught up to her girls as they retreated to the Sitsips buffet line at the other end of the beach.

"What's her problem?" Alera said, angry for being made to feel ashamed of herself.

Lena put her arm around Bethany's shoulder. The girl was hiding her tears behind her long hair. "It's okay. You didn't do anything wrong. She's a very marginalized, frightened young woman, in a very bad situation."

"Does that mean she's allowed to be a b-i-t-c-h?" Bethany said in a soggy voice.

"A little bit," Lena said. "I mean, no, of course not. But it does explain an awful lot."

"Those poor women," Bethany said.

Lena led the girls up the beach, equidistant from the camp and the Sitsips women. She drew them into a clearing in the bushes, where they could sit on someone's long forgotten canoe and talk in relative privacy.

"You girls did good," Lena said. "So what's the deal?" It was a Hawkeye phrase.

"Have you read 'The Yellow Wallpaper' by Charlotte Gilman?" Bethany said.

"No," Lena said. "What's going on?"

"You really should, it -"

"Bethany," Lena said.

"They're supposed to sit in there until they agree to give up their babies," Alera said.

"What?" Lena said, horrified.

"They both just had babies, like, a few months ago," Alera said. "But they're saying the kids don't belong to them, they belong to some god or something, until the god says who the kids' parents are. They're called weaning women, like, they're just there to provide the milk."

"And then they're weaned off?" Lena said."That's what we read."

"No, you don't get it," Bethany said. "Their kids are weaned off of _motherhood. _Meanwhile the mothers are supposed to just sit in there and go crazy. 'The Yellow Wallpaper' is about how women used to be secluded or 'convalesced' after they had a baby and just lie in bed for months. That's what they're doing. They're all full of postpartum depression and totally manipulatable."

"I think they'd agree if their guru told them to paint themselves purple and light their hair on fire," Alera said.

"So that's how they do it," Lena said.

"Yeah," Alera said. "Highly ritualized gaslighting."

"And look around," Bethany pointed out. "No one is standing up for these girls. It's institutionalized."

"Everyone else here has gone through it," Lena said. "They agree, or . . . no." She looked over the encampment. Women were tired, working hard. None of the children resembled each their mothers. "The baby-making must be ritualized, too. To induct them, don't you think? Join the group, have a baby? And then if they play along, somewhere along they get some baby, eventually."

"The mother said they hoped their kid would be sent away, so they wouldn't have to see someone else raise it," Alera said.

Lena nodded. "I don't know what we can do about this. There's so many of them."

"Call the cops?"

Lena swallowed. "I guess it'll come to that."

"This place gives me the creeps," Bethany said. "Can we go now?"

While the other women reclaimed the dishes, and Bethany and Alera walked together back to the women's barn, Lena returned to Becca. When she thought no one was watching, Becca sat staring at the fire, her spinning slack in her hands. Her eyes looked far away at nothing.

Lena sat beside her on the bench. Becca looked up, shaken from her internal contemplation.

"It takes a lot of work to make a society." Becca's eyes were bright from smoke or emotion. "If you can't live by the rules, you don't have to be here."

Lena lowered another log onto the fire. "Becca, your father is very worried about you. I think it would make him feel a lot better if he just talked to you and saw that you're okay, and you're happy."

Becca poked at the log Lena had just placed. "My father's feelings are no longer my responsibility."

Lena sighed.

Becca whirled a clump of floss into thread in seconds. "However. If Bear wants us to become friendly with your group, I supposed I could make the first step and bridge communications with one of the members."

You mean, Lena thought, you'll only see your father to get closer to your demigod.

"I'll take it," Lena said. "Are you busy right now?"

Read more of my M*A*S*H fic at my fic journal, 


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